Jacinto Torres emigrated from Mexico nearly four decades ago in search of the American dream. He took a stuffy corporate job, but it never really suited the personality of a man with such long and curly hair that friends called him the “mop”.
About 20 years ago he moved into real estate, focusing on helping new Hispanic immigrants navigate bureaucracy, find homes and get settled.
But property was not Torres’s passion. That was journalism.
Known as Jay, Torres was a 57-year-old freelance reporter and photographer for La Estrella, a Spanish-language sister publication of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
A month after his murder, police are still investigating whether his death was a collision of his two professional worlds. Torres was found shot dead on 13 June in the back yard of a vacant house in a middle-class residential street in the Dallas suburb of Garland that he and his business partner were planning to fix up and flip.
Garland police spokesman Lt Pedro Barineau said on Wednesday that the investigation is ongoing and detectives do not have any suspects. Federal agencies including the FBI are assisting with data recovery.
Torres’s family is baffled. With the help of a private investigator who is a family friend they have combed through his life, wondering whether he was killed because of his reporting, or perhaps as a result of a falling-out with one of his many tenants.
Jay Torres’s daughter, Aline Torres, says she is “leaning towards” his journalism as a more likely explanation.
“For this to happen in a really nice, well-established neighbourhood, it doesn’t make sense to me,” she said.
“Sometimes people get upset because they move out of a place but they expect their entire security deposit back but they leave trash or they do whatever … I can’t wrap my mind around someone taking someone’s life over what’s less than $2,000.”
“From what I’ve seen and what I’ve been able to find, it’s equal on both ends, it could have been [either],” said his son, Gibran Torres, in an interview near Dallas last week. He said that his father had recently considered installing a surveillance system to screen visitors.
Jay Torres started off writing travel articles, but his work grew more politically aware over the years as he increasingly covered community-impact stories.
Aline Torres said that last fall her father mentioned a story about an unnamed company scamming Hispanic people who struggled with housing payments, and that “somebody got really upset with him and told him to stop nosing around”, but around the time of his death he was “working on a humanitarian piece; wasn’t anything that would raise a red flag. About getting people to vote – as far as politics goes, pretty tame.”
She said she was not aware of any work that might have attracted the ire of groups such as Mexican drug cartels, but Carlos Lauría, program director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said that some Hispanic reporters are concerned about the possibility of spillover violence given the precarious situation for journalists south of the border.
“It’s a very risky job for Mexican journalists, no question about it. Mexico’s one of the most dangerous countries for press in the world,” he said. “We are concerned that reporters feel that digging into these issues is becoming dangerous.”
Lauría said that the CPJ has counted seven journalists in the US confirmed killed as a result of their work since 1992. “I can’t say that it’s becoming much more dangerous [to report in the US] on these issues, or for Hispanic journalists; there’s not data for us to be able to make that argument,” he said.
Torres’s family is finding the uncertainty difficult to handle. “It’s really hard not knowing why and not knowing who because I have to look over my shoulder,” said Aline Torres, who is keeping busy taking care of her father’s property business, her dream of opening a glassworks studio delayed indefinitely.
Nor have they yet been able to take him to Mexico for burial. Police believe Torres was killed about three days before he was found, and because the weather was especially hot, wet and humid that weekend, his body had decomposed to such an extent that in the absence of dental records, formal identification using DNA analysis is required before authorities will release his remains. The process can take up to 12 weeks.
Torres had many passions: he loved to travel with his family, he practiced yoga, he was deeply involved in the [Dallas-Fort Worth] Hispanic Communicators and he served as a mentor to young journalists.
“He worked a full-time job as a real estate agent, but always found the time to write stories and capture with his camera this growing community,” said Juan Antonio Ramos, executive editor of La Estrella.
Gibran Torres remembers his father as “always very playful and happy”.
“He didn’t know a lot about engineering, or technology, but he knew a lot about people. He was a people person. He really was one of those people that if you ever needed something he would know somebody, or he would ask for a favour from someone that owes him a favour,” the 28-year-old said. “He just liked to talked to people and liked to see what people were about and I guess that’s what contributed to him being able to write so many stories for La Estrella.”
