`Delayed Deaths` Rarely Bring Homicide Charges

Edward Rodriguez died from bladder cancer at his South Austin home in April, less than a week after he was placed in hospice care.

The manner of his death, however, was homicide.

The 66-year-old's cancer was the result of a catheter he needed after he was shot and paralyzed at an East Austin laundromat in 1976, according to an investigation report from the Travis County medical examiner's office.

Just as if he had died as the ambulance brought him bleeding to a hospital that year, Austin police officers started to look into his murder. But such killings, caused by injuries sustained years earlier, rarely result in charges.

Homicides represent only a sliver of the cases that wind up in the medical examiner's office each year, with 38 in Travis County in 2012 -- 3 percent of all county deaths the office investigated. That's compared with 535 accidents, such as falling, drug overdoses or wrecks, which account for nearly half of all deaths in the county that the office investigated last year.

Even rarer than homicides are "delayed deaths" like Rodriguez's.

But David Dolinak, the county's medical examiner, said that the few delayed deaths his office does investigate usually result from car crashes, where someone's head, neck or spine was injured. Not shootings.

Records show Rodriguez was with his girlfriend at a laundromat on Airport Boulevard near Springdale Road in 1976 when a man entered and asked if the woman was the owner. Rodriguez and the man started to argue and went outside. Gunshots were heard, and Rodriguez's girlfriend found him on the ground. When police arrived, he was lying on his back outside the laundromat with multiple gunshot wounds. One bullet to his back paralyzed him.

Days after the shooting, Henry Jackson Jr. was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon but he said that he had been defending himself, and the district attorney's office decided not to prosecute the case.

Jackson died in the early 1990s, said Austin Police Sgt. Brian Miller, and in November 2012, Rodriguez was diagnosed with bladder cancer. The department officially closed the homicide case in June.

It was the city's second delayed homicide case in two years that ended because the victim outlived the alleged offender.

In May 2012, Linda Gatica, 36, died years after police believe she suffered blunt force injury to the head at the hands of her grandmother when she was 4 months old. After the incident, Gatica was diagnosed with severe mental retardation and quadriplegia, according to reports, and she lived nearly all of her life as a ward of the state, afflicted by seizure disorder and cerebral palsy, among other conditions.

The grandmother, who died of natural causes in 1982, was never charged in connection with Gatica's injuries. If she had been, any resulting prosecution could have jeopardized later charges in Gatica's death.

Similarly, had the district attorney's office pursued the assault charge against Jackson, prosecutors would have been prevented from charging him with murder under the legal clause that prohibits double jeopardy, said Gary Cobb, an assistant district attorney.

A famous example is University of Texas Tower sniper Charles Whitman. Whitman shot 23-year-old David Gunby in 1966, damaging a kidney. In 2001, Gunby died in Fort Worth after spending 35 years on dialysis, suffering a failed kidney transplant and going blind and becoming bedridden. As the Tarrant County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, he became Whitman's 15th victim.

The sniper was dead but he wouldn't have faced murder charges because, Cobb said, he would have already been charged with aggravated assault for the injuries the man suffered.

It's a conflict, he said, that is unavoidable.

"We're not going to wait around for them to die," he said of such homicide victims.

But even if the suspect isn't dead, nor charged at the time of the incident, time takes its toll, Cobb said, on the crime scene and the memories of witnesses, if there are any.

Miller said they're tough cases to prove. And charges can be elusive.

Exactly how elusive isn't clear because the Austin Police Department does not track those kinds of cases in a way that the information can be easily searched, according to officials with the department's homicide unit. But Sgt. Scott Elhert said he could not recall any delayed death homicides in the recent past that have led to new charges being filed.

As of June, all the cases were closed. Cobb said he can't remember a homicide case like Gatica's or Rodriguez's that was prosecuted.

"Generally, if people die, they're going to die early," he said.

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