HUNSTVILLE, Texas (AP) — Pablo Lucio Vasquez remembered getting drunk and high on an April evening in 1998 before leaving a party with his 15-year-old cousin and his cousin’s 12-year-old friend.
Vasquez later would tell detectives that as they reached a wooden shed, he started hearing voices telling him to kill the younger boy, David Cardenas. So he hit the seventh-grader in the head from behind with a pipe, cut his throat and lifted the still-conscious victim so blood would drip on the 20-year-old Vasquez’s face.
“Something just told me to drink,” Vasquez said in a videotaped statement to police in Donna, a small town in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
“You drink what?” a detective asked. “His blood,” Vasquez replied.
Vasquez, now 38, is set for lethal injection Wednesday for what police speculated at the time may have been an attempted satanic cult crime. Evidence of that nature, however, didn’t surface at Vasquez’s 1999 capital murder trial or in appeals, where courts as recent as last month rejected arguments Vasquez was mentally ill and should be exempt from the death penalty.
His execution would be the 11th this year nationally, and the sixth in Texas.
Vasquez’s lawyer, James Keegan, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the punishment so the justices can consider arguments that several potential jurors were excluded improperly at Vasquez’s trial because they either were opposed to the death penalty or not comfortable making such a judgment.
A death sentence shouldn’t be carried out if it was reached by a jury that rejected members “simply because they voiced general objections to the death penalty or expressed conscientious or religious scruples against its infliction,” Keegan told the high court, which did not immediately rule on the appeal.
Eighteen years ago this month, Cardenas, who lived with his sister about five miles from Donna, was spending the weekend with Vasquez’s cousin, 15-year-old Andres Rafael Chapa. Both went to a party on April 18, and were seen rolling marijuana cigarettes; Vasquez also attended.
Police received an anonymous tip about the slaying that led them to Chapa and eventually to Vasquez, who was arrested in Conroe, a Houston suburb more than 325 miles north of Donna. Authorities found the body — missing some limbs — five days later under some scraps of aluminum in a vacant field. A blood trail showed it was dragged to the site, including crossing a four-lane main street in Donna.
“They decided they were going to try to take his head off with a shovel and didn’t realize that it was a lot more difficult to cut someone’s head off,” Joseph Orendain, the lead trial prosecutor, recalled last week. “It was a mutilated body left behind. … It was really horrendous.”
Vasquez, who said he took a gold ring and necklace from Cardenas, told police that Chapa also participated in trying to decapitate the boy. “The devil was telling me to take (the head) away from him,” Vasquez said, adding that “it couldn’t come off.”
Chapa pleaded guilty to a murder charge for his involvement and is serving a 35-year prison term. Three other relatives of Chapa and Vasquez received probation and a small fine for helping cover up the slaying. One of them was deported to Guatemala.
Vasquez declined an interview request from The Associated Press as his execution date neared. His statement to police fueled speculation about satanism, but Orendain said he had no idea if that connection could be made.
“He was really just a sociopath,” Orendain said.
AP Article By MICHAEL GRACZYK
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.