By Rick Halperin
The Dallas Morning News
There was a summer 50 years ago in Dallas rocked by the senseless murder of a 12 -year-old at the hands of a Dallas police officer. The incident overshadowed the innocence, travel and care-free “school’s out” musings and left an open wound on the city that has yet to fully heal. In the early morning hours of July 24, 1973, two Dallas police officers took the Rodriguez brothers — David, 13, and Santos, 12 — from their grandfather’s home and placed them in a police car, handcuffed.
Officer Darrell Cain put Santos, still in his pajamas, in the right front passenger seat. Cain placed himself in the back seat, directly behind the boy, threatening him with his revolver to “confess” to breaking into a nearby gas station the previous day and committing an $8 burglary.
The brothers proclaimed their innocence, and Santos’ last words were “I am telling the truth.”
Officer Cain, playing Russian roulette, pulled the trigger and virtually assassinated Santos, shooting him in the head and killing him instantly, splattering his brains and blood inside the police car and over his brother David, who had been told to sit in the back of the vehicle next to Cain.
This inexcusable, egregious act of murder of a hand-cuffed 12-year-old child inside a Dallas police car led to the only race riot led by Hispanics in the city’s history four days later on July 28, 1973.
Downtown Dallas came under siege as storefront windows were smashed, police motorcycles torched and five city police officers were injured.
The Santos murder was and remains one of the most notorious homicides in Dallas’ history.
Dallas’ police chief did not defend Cain and admitted his police department showed racial bias in its enforcement. Then, a police investigation found that fingerprints at the scene of the burglary did not match that of Santos or David.
Officer Cain was arrested and found guilty in November 1973, but his lenient five-year sentence for murder with malice prompted more protests and calls from Mexican American leaders for a federal investigation. The Washington Post reported that President Jimmy Carter even asked Attorney General Griffin B. Bell in 1978 if he would review whether Cain should be federally prosecuted.
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