Pure Murder

by Corey Mitchell

  After the evaluation, the Hamilton staff members, Dr. Felkins, and Suzie Cantu agreed it would be best to place Peter at the Harper Alternative School, a school for troubled or emotionally disturbed students.

  The goal was for him to attend Harper for one semester, hope he could get his act together, and let him return to regular ninth grade afterward.

  Suzie Cantu had a completely different take on how the staff at Hamilton helped her son. She complained the principal “ignored her pleas to help her son” and instead “simply expelled him.” She also claimed the staff at Hamilton “never showed me that report” in reference to Dr. Felkins’s psychiatric evaluation of her son. Peter Cantu attempted to reenroll at Hamilton; however, Principal Diana Mulet would not allow him to return.

  When asked why a disruptive student is usually transferred, Mulet stated it would be to hopefully provide a better environment for the student so he or she can improve his or her behavior. When asked specifically why she had requested Peter Cantu’s transfer, Mulet candidly replied, “To be honest, I just felt like he didn’t need to be in my school anymore.”

  It did not take long for Peter Cantu to have run-ins with the authority figures at Harper. According to Harper principal Paul Hanser, the school accepts students from the ages of thirteen to twenty-two. He added, “Part of getting to our school is that you have to really be out of every other school because of behavior problems.” He also stated Harper is “like a school of last resort.” The school’s directive is to help straighten out its students so they can get back to their school with an improved outlook on life.

  Harper requires its students to stay within their system for at least ninety days. If at the end of that period the student has proven that he or she can keep his or her bad behaviors in check, the school allows him or her to return to the student’s previous educational institution. According to Hanser, however, the average length of stay for a student at Harper was two years.

  Hanser also stressed one of their goals is to make the student understand his actions and to take responsibility for those actions. “Our motto is, ‘Together, we can,’” Hanser explained. “It’s not the parents’ fault that your child is this way. It’s not our fault that he is not responding, but if we all work together, maybe he’ll take responsibility for his actions and move ahead.”

  The success rate at Harper at the time was nearly 20 percent. Hanser was proud of that number. When he started eight years earlier, it was only 2 percent.

  Peter was the second Cantu family member to be sent to Harper. His older brother Joe was also a student there. According to Hanser, Joe did very well at Harper and suggested to the principal they take in his brother who was getting into all sorts of trouble. The school agreed and allowed Peter to attend.

  Peter Cantu’s first year was “oppositional,” according to Hanser, but he showed signs of improvement. This was mainly due to having only one teacher and one assistant so he was able to focus on the work at hand.

  During his second year, Peter was placed into a so-called “high-school environment,” where he did not function nearly as well. Mainly, he started skipping class. Other days, he would show up for his first class and then skip out the rest of the day.

  Hanser noted that Peter had befriended another student, Sean O’Brien, with whom he would skip classes. Someone had informed Hanser that Peter and Sean would take off and head over to Peter’s house, where the two boys would drink alcohol and do drugs. He could not confirm the information, but he had his suspicions.

  Hanser did speak with Suzie Cantu about her son’s potential abuse problems and encouraged her to seek drug-and-alcohol counseling for him. According to Hanser, Mrs. Cantu seemed receptive, but he did not think she was able to follow through because she claimed she ran into too much bureaucratic red tape.

  Hanser continued to work with Peter and help him through his issues. He described the young man as “belligerent” and difficult to work with. Peter would curse at Hanser if the principal said something he didn’t like. He was also prone to walk away from the principal in the middle of a discussion and Hanser would end up having to chase Peter down to finish speaking to him. Peter also cursed at his teachers constantly. It was slow and not-so-steady progress dealing with Peter Cantu.

  Looking at his educational records, it is readily apparent that Peter was not a good student. Not surprisingly, his mother, Suzie Cantu, had a different recollection.

  “I know in school he did pretty good,” Mrs. Cantu mysteriously recalled. “I know he got into trouble a little bit in school, but I know that other than that, his grades were always fair to pretty good. He got trophies for rope jumping. He also got trophies for being the Most Outstanding Student at Harper Alternative School for having the greatest improvement in his grades from the time he entered the school until the time he finished.”

  Mrs. Cantu also recalled some of Peter’s sporting background. “He got some trophies for playing baseball. He played for three years. It would have been four years, except the third year he broke his foot going bike riding. That’s when he did the rope jumping with the cast on. He did the jump rope contest at school with the cast on and he won. One of his baseball trophies was for the all-stars. He made the all-stars team and he was pretty good. He was the catcher for those years and he also played shortstop and second base, but mostly he was the catcher.”

  According to his mother, as Peter got older, his tastes began to change. “While he was in Harper, he also worked on cars. He was a mechanic.

  “And then one year they started to have weight lifting, so he started picking up weights and he got first place, two years straight in a row, as the one who picked up the most weight. One year he picked up six hundred seventy-five [pounds] total. The following year, he took it with six hundred ninety [pounds] total, so he was pretty good. Each year he got one medal. Each year he got first place.”

  When asked what her son was like growing up, Mrs. Cantu replied, “To me, he was a normal son, just like every other normal kid. He comes home with a bad grade or something, I ground him. I took the phone and TV away from him. Tell him he couldn’t go out until I see that his homework is done, finished. He’s grounded until his grades go up. His grades go up and then go back to his normal routine. Using the phone and using the TV.”

  Suzie Cantu seemed to ignore the fact that her son was not the perfect boy. Whenever he would get into trouble, and she or Rudy would ground him, he was usually nonplussed. “He would just say, ‘For how long? How many days?’ And I said, ‘Until I get a report from school that says your grades are improving and going up. Until I feel that you are doing okay, then you are grounded.’ He never complained about it, though.”

  Peter began to feel a bit more useful when he learned how to work on cars. “Yeah, he was pretty good on that,” his mother recalled. “He’d change the oil in my car. If it needed brakes, he managed to buy the brakes and fix it and put them on. Or if it needed a jump or a tune-up, he could do it. I never had to go to a mechanic, mostly because Peter was the one who could do it all. He’s very good with cars. He used to watch his grandfather on my husband’s side. That’s all they used to do is fix cars, so he learned how to fix them. He learned by watching.”

  Suzie Cantu did know her son was lazy. Whenever Peter had to go to work, “I woke him up and told him to get up and go to work. There were mornings when he said he didn’t want to go to work or he was going to call in sick, but I made sure he got up.”

  Mrs. Cantu did notice a bit of anger in her son; however, she probably would have characterized it more as irritation. She recalled that Peter would “get mad when I got after him, he gets mad. He said, ‘Gee, Mom. I know, I know.’ But get violent or strike me, no.”

  She also mentioned it was common for Peter to get into arguments with his brothers. “They argued. They’d argue and fight and then they’d make up and go outside and play, or they’d go to McDonald’s and they’d be happy.”

  Suzie also mentioned that
Peter was nice to women and even had a steady girlfriend. When asked how he treated girls, she responded, “He treats them okay. He talks to them. There used to be a lot of girls that would call him up at home and I never heard him say anything bad on the phone or at any time.” She added he was very respectful toward women.

  Mrs. Cantu believed the girls liked Peter, but he was in a committed three-year relationship, so he would just be friendly with his admirers. “There was one who used to come over and stand on the porch and she would talk to him,” Suzie Cantu recalled. “And they talked, but they never came inside. They always talked on the porch.”

  Mrs. Cantu stressed that “at that time he was settled down with one particular girl, so he didn’t really used to bring them over to the house. He didn’t used to say that this was his girlfriend until later on, when he found one that he went out with for about three years.” According to Peter’s mother, his girlfriend and her family had to move away because her father’s company transferred him.

  Peter and his girlfriend kept in touch mainly by writing letters and talking on the telephone. Mrs. Cantu added, “She would come down during the summer and they would see each other, or when I go up there where she’s at, he comes with me and visits her there.” She added that their relationship ended because they could not financially afford to keep it up. “I finally had to take the long-distance calls off my phone because the long distance was getting too high.”

  Mrs. Cantu also spoke of Peter’s role amongst his friends. “I don’t think he was a leader,” she stated. “That’s because whenever Joe or Efrain called him, they used to tell him to go somewhere and he said, ‘Mom, I’m going to go with Joe.’ I never heard him call them and say, ‘We need to go somewhere’ or anything like that. They would call him up and he would stop watching TV, get dressed, and wait until they came and picked him up.”

  On December 6, 1991, somewhere between 4:30 and 5:00 P.M., Anthony Morado received a phone call from his wife, who was working the three-to-eleven evening shift at Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital. She was upset because she had just found out their family car had been stolen from the hospital parking lot.

  Anthony rushed to the hospital, where he met his wife, who showed him the leftover passenger-side window’s broken glass, which had been shattered to gain access to their car. The couple contacted the police.

  Early the following morning, around 12:30 A.M., Houston police officers Kenneth Tagger and James Godfrey were driving their squad car south on Antoine Drive when a vehicle sped by from the opposite direction. Officer Tagger turned around, went after the vehicle, and ordered the driver to pull the car into a parking lot.

  The police officer drove up behind the car and directed his spotlight on the vehicle. He noticed there were four people inside. Suddenly the driver’s-side door flew open and the driver bounded out of his seat and headed back toward the police car—which does not make most police officers very happy.

  Officer Godfrey spotted the driver’s-side backseat passenger bend over, which usually indicates a passenger is either hiding something or retrieving something under the seat. An officer’s worst fear is the person is reaching for a weapon, usually a gun.

  “Get your hands up!” Officer Godfrey hollered to the backseat passenger. “Put them up, now!”

  Meanwhile, the driver of the car, Peter Cantu, ran back toward the police car. Officer Tagger quickly exited his vehicle to halt the driver. “Whose car is this?” the officer asked the teenager.

  “It’s a borrowed car,” Peter replied.

  Officer Godfrey also exited the cruiser, walked up to the car, and made sure the three other passengers were in a secure position so no one could attempt to hurt the officers. He walked up to the passenger side and motioned for the remaining three passengers to get out of the car. The young men sheepishly exited the vehicle. Godfrey looked at the inside of the car and noticed that the steering column had been broken, a telltale sign of a stolen car. He hollered as much to his partner.

  Officer Tagger walked up to Peter and placed him under arrest, handcuffed him, and stuck him in the back of the squad car.

  Officer Godfrey searched under the driver’s-side seat and discovered a long screwdriver, which is often used to break a steering column, thus allowing a thief to hot-wire and steal it.

  Peter Cantu was arrested for automobile theft, whisked away to the Juvenile Division, and taken into custody. The passenger behind Cantu was an eighteen-year-old man named Frank Sandoval. His twin brother, Ramon, sat next to him in the backseat. Both men were charged with public intoxication.

  Officers Tagger and Godfrey drove Peter Cantu back to the police station. Godfrey was surprised at his attitude. Most teenagers expressed a fear of being arrested, so Godfrey would usually give them the old “don’t go down the wrong path” speech. He tried with Peter, but he could tell it was worthless.

  “It was no big thing that he was going to jail,” Godfrey said of Peter Cantu. The boy did not care.

  In April 1992, Harper principal Paul Hanser received an alert that Peter Cantu was once again out of control. One of the school’s security officers had detained the student in an isolation area and needed Hanser’s assistance in calming him down.

  Harper had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to its students carrying beepers to class. It was Hanser’s belief, as he said, “whether right or wrong,” that if a student carried a beeper, it was not for “productive purposes.” He instituted the “no beeper rule,” and teachers were allowed to confiscate them from the students. Peter Cantu broke that policy and brought a beeper to school, which was subsequently taken away from him. He was not pleased.

  While being held in the isolation room, Peter grabbed a teacher’s desk made out of solid oak, picked it up, and smashed it into several pieces on the floor. Peter had been upset about having his beeper taken away and demanded that the female security guard give it back to him.

  Hanser entered the room, witnessed the destruction, and watched as Peter screamed at the guard, “You better give it back to me!” He turned to Hanser and started threatening the principal. “You better give me my pager, or I’ll get you!”

  Hanser was nonplussed. He was used to dealing with belligerent students on a daily basis. “Peter, you need to just calm down, son,” Hanser attempted to reassure him.

  “I want my goddamn pager back!” Peter screamed at him.

  Hanser now knew “there was no pulling back, he was going to have that beeper or else.” He looked at his student and said, “It’s really time for you to go home.”

  “I ain’t leaving without my pager!” he screamed again.

  “You cannot have this beeper, and if you walk out of here with it, I will call the police and you will be arrested for trespassing, because you’re no longer welcome this day on campus and you’ll wind up in Juvenile,” Hanser informed him.

  Peter finally slowed down for a moment. He began to walk toward the door, but then started up again. “Give me that goddamned pager!” he yelled at Hanser one more time.

  “You’re going home for the day, Peter. That’s it.”

  “Well, I’m not coming back,” Cantu barked at the principal.

  “Peter, you have to, because you’re seventeen.”

  Peter stared directly at Hanser and countered, “Well, if I come back, I’m going to kill your ass.”

  “That would be a mistake,” Hanser calmly replied, “because you’d get locked up for that and there will just be somebody else to come in and take my place.”

  Peter defiantly jutted his chin out and replied, “Nothing’s gonna happen to me, ’cause I’m not that old.” He stormed out of the isolation room.

  Hanser was not fearful of the boy’s threat. He was threatened by students quite often. It came with the territory, so he did not put much credence into the claim.

  Hanser did not see Peter Cantu again until the last day of school that June, when Peter came to campus to talk to one of the school’s teachers out by the
buses.

  Peter finally got kicked out of Harper for failing to show up one too many times. In reality, he had simply stopped going.

  “I guess, he just got bored, or he didn’t like it,” Suzie Cantu said of her son and his academic career. “What he liked the most was to run his cars. When he got this job changing oil, and then the school didn’t want to give him half the day to go to work and half a day of school, he just decided to quit and to go full-time at work. They told him they needed to know a year in advance before they could do that and he said he needed to keep his job full-time, so he chose work.”

  Saturday, January 9, 1993—9:00 P.M.

  Houston Astrodome

  Monster Truck Pull Show

  Kirby Drive

  Houston, Texas

  Seventeen-year-old Worthing High School student Mario Harkles hustled his butt over to yet another concession stand on the slick floors that encircled the mezzanine section of the Astrodome. Mario was a runner for the Harry M. Stevens concessions company, which handled all of the concession food sales in the Houston sporting facility. His job was to run from concession stand to concession stand and make sure they were fully stocked with food and drinks. He had been doing the job for two years and was good at what he did.

  On this night, he was partnered up with a coworker and friend named Chris, who was checking on one of the concession stands. While Chris stocked, Mario decided to take a look at the monster truck competition roaring down below on the temporarily dirt-covered floor of the Astrodome.

  “C’mon, Mario. Let’s go check out the next stand,” Chris said, motioning.

  The two boys took off down the large hallway. Ahead of them, Mario noticed a strange commotion taking place. People who were walking were moving over to the side as if being pushed; they looked upset.