By Nicole Hensley
Houston Chronicle
HOUSTON — Amid a violent year in Houston that escalated Monday with the deaths of six people, including a Houston Police Department sergeant, the number of murders in the city has reached the highest point in more than a decade.
Police have attributed at least 345 deaths this year to murder, effectively ending a four-year predominantly downward trend. With about seven weeks remaining until the year’s end, Houston’s murders — should they continue their upward trend — could tail the per capita murder rate of those killed in 2006, when HPD tracked 376 murders.
But the murder rate — calculated by the number of murders per 100,000 people — in Houston has historically fluctuated since 1980. According to a Houston Chronicle analysis of crime statistics, it would take scores more murders to outpace the city’s all-time high of 701 killings in 1981, during Houston’s economic boom. Records show 1991 was also an especially deadly year with 617 murders in a city that then had a population of about 1.7 million.
The lowest number of murders — 198 people — was reported in 2011 when 2.1 million people lived in Houston.
Mayor Sylvester Turner this week said that while 2020 has been “a disturbing year,” the city is not alone in its crime wave. Other cities are experiencing “a great deal of violence.”
“A lot of things are happening on our streets,” Turner continued. “A lot of people who are on edge. I want people to pray for our city and kind of calm down. Bring the violence down.”
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Each murder victim from this year, he said, has loved ones “who are in a great deal of pain.”
“It’s our goal to do everything we can to solve all of those cases, to bring some degree of closure to the families who have been involved,” he said, while standing alongside police Chief Art Acevedo during a news conference.
Violent crime overall has been increasing in recent months because of a higher number of aggravated assaults, crime data shows.
As for what is driving the increase in murders, Turner was puzzled.
“I wish I could explain why people do the things that they do,” the mayor said. “But I will say, COVID-19 is not a justification for any kind of crime.”
For the first half of 2020, the FBI found a nearly 15 percent increase in the nation’s murders and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses compared to the same time last year.
Howard Henderson, director of Texas Southern University’s Center for Justice Research, said the rise in murders is the first sign “that the system is breaking down.”
“There’s something going on,” Henderson said, pointing to a rise in inequality and diminished social services in a city that has been unable to keep up with years of massive growth.
“When you have unemployment, when you have educational deficiencies, when you have a taxing of all the resources, you see a rise in homicide,” he continued. The pandemic, he said, has exacerbated concentrated pockets of poverty and the high cost of living.
Worries surrounding the mounting deaths — during an already anxious year plagued by a pandemic and a presidential election — grew Monday as homicide investigators rushed out to six separate scenes. Half of the victims were killed in a five-hour stretch before noon from Chinatown, Montrose and a few blocks west of Jack Yates High School.
Investigators started at 6:45 a.m. with the death of a man found with a gunshot wound on a sidewalk outside a Montrose home. Minutes later, police found another slain man in an Alief ISD elementary school parking lot.
A third death was reported around 8 a.m. when police apprehended a man accused of fatally stabbing another outside a south Houston group home. By noon, a fourth man, identified in court records as Dietrich Hawkins, was killed in Third Ward. His alleged assailant, Aaron Domanguex, was arrested Tuesday and charged with murder, according to court records.
Monday afternoon, law enforcement flocked to the Taj Inn & Suites, near Interstate 45 and West Little York, where Sgt. Sean Rios collapsed and died after being shot on his way to an afternoon shift at Bush Intercontinental Airport. Police spent the night looking for his assailant and apprehended the suspected shooter, Robert Soliz, on Tuesday afternoon.
Investigators capped the night at a Motel 6 on Kuykendahl Road, near Rankin Road, where a woman was shot to death. Two people have been arrested in that killing, officials said.
Despite the rush to find the suspect in Rios’ death, Acevedo said homicide investigators focused on the string of killings.
Identifications for the four others killed Monday were not available through the medical examiner’s office.
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