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 Editorials | Issues | April 2008 
The People Say 'Why?'
 Sara Burnett - Rocky Mountain News
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| | A copy of the local newspaper, Vallarta Opina, published a photograph of Alfonso Ramirez Sastre, the alleged killer of 21- year-old CU student David Parrish. Ramirez was in the resort city with his wife and child. The headlines read: looking for 30-year-old dangerous fugitive from Guadalajara. (Javier Manzano/The Rocky) | | |
How things went from bad to worse in slaying of CU student in Mexico
About 30 miles up the coast from this popular tourist town sits the small fishing community of Sayulita.
It's a place people go to get away from the spring break crowds and seven-day all-inclusive resorts to the south. Here colorful little restaurants surround el centro, the town's brick central plaza. Mexicans and people from the north intermingle, and along the white beaches, surfers praise the waves.
Last week, Boulder resident Janet Graaff and her son, David Parrish, bought their own little piece of life here, a vacation home previously owned by an elderly couple.
The small, intimate community with a hippie vibe was a good fit for a mother who once created a multiracial community in the "whites only" area of South Africa, and a well-traveled son who, his family said, saw "beauty in all things."
On Wednesday, March 26, after closing on the house, Graaff, a University of Colorado instructor, and Parrish, 21, a CU student, drove to Puerto Vallarta to buy furniture to fill it.
There, along a busy street across from the port where enormous cruise ships unload passengers, the unheard of happened.
Two men, strangers until a few days earlier, attempted to rob Graaff. When Parrish came to her rescue, one of the men shot him dead.
Days later, the case got worse.
One of the men - believed to have been the killer - posed as another inmate about to be released from jail. He walked free, and with the aid of another man, disappeared from town.
The escape of 30-year-old Alfonso Ramirez Sastre quickly became an embarrassment for Mexican authorities, who have launched a countrywide search to find him and an internal investigation into how he escaped. It also has them worried Parrish's death will scare away tourists - the Puerto Vallarta's lifeblood at almost 3 million visitors per year.
On Friday, the newly appointed head of public security sat behind a large wooden desk, typed notes spread out before him, and expressed deep regret to Parrish's family - Graaff, her ex-husband, Steve Parrish, and daughter Leslie Parrish.
He also said authorities are working day and night to capture the killer.
"We know that nothing can remedy the great loss they have suffered," said Armando Partida Zamudio, who was selected last week to replace the previous director while the internal investigation is conducted.
"We can't turn back the clock . . . but we are not going to rest until he is caught."
Following the money
Officials say Ramirez, the alleged killer, who lives in Aguascalientes, Mexico, was in Puerto Vallarta last week vacationing with his wife and child.
He met his accomplice in the killing, Daniel Vargas Castaneda, a few nights before the murder at a bar in the center of Puerto Vallarta, close to the hotel where he was staying with his family.
The two exchanged phone numbers and agreed to get together a few days later to pick up some women, police said. After meeting again that Wednesday afternoon, they decided they needed some money to cover the cost of their carousing.
Ramirez went to a cash machine inside a bank in the busy Plaza Marina, a popular waterfront stop for visitors who want to pick up groceries or buy souvenirs. In line in front of him he saw Graaff withdrawing a large amount of cash.
Police say Ramirez walked outside and told Vargas that the woman had money. They sat in Ramirez's Chrysler Avenger and watched as Graaff and Parrish went to eat at a Subway. When the mother and son got into their Dodge Alto and drove down the street, the men followed.
Graaff and Parrish pulled up to a furniture store and went inside, where they looked at new furnishings and chatted with a store clerk.
Around 4 p.m., Graaff walked outside to her car. She had a gray camera case strapped to her body. It contained her money, about $6,800, most of it in U.S. currency.
The men approached and demanded the bag. As they began pulling at it, Parrish saw what was happening and ran outside. The three men began fighting.
Police said Vargas handed Ramirez a .38-caliber handgun and told him to shoot. He pulled the trigger, firing one shot into the right side of Parrish's abdomen.
Parrish fell onto the street in front of the store, and less than 20 yards from the front door of a next-door hospital.
As Ramirez and Vargas ran toward their car, Graaff followed them, screaming, witnesses said.
A police officer patrolling on foot saw the commotion and called for backup. Within minutes more than 20 officers had descended on the scene and detained the two men, as several taxi drivers who had pulled over to help stood outside their cars, pointing at them, according to police and witness accounts.
Graaff identified the men at the scene. Under the front seat of Ramirez's car, officers found the loaded gun, missing just one bullet.
Though doctors and nurses came running outside the hospital to help, Parrish died within minutes.
It was the first killing of an American tourist in Puerto Vallarta on record with the U.S. Embassy, an official there said.
'Mistakes were made'
At the municipal jail, a sparse eight-cell building in a middle-income area east of the city's beaches and high-rise hotels, Ramirez and Vargas were placed with other inmates in cell eight, reserved for the jail's most serious offenders. But a fight broke out, and Ramirez was moved to another cell.
He shared cell five with at least four other men, including two teens who had been arrested earlier that day for stealing a bottle of tequila: Erick de Jesus Nava Romo, 18, and Julio Cesar Altamirano Rodriguez, 19.
Sometime between March 27 and early that Friday morning, when the two teens were to be released, Ramirez persuaded them to help him escape, saying he would pay each the equivalent of about $5,000, authorities said.
Ramirez exchanged clothes with Altamirano, giving him his pants and white T-shirt with blue flowers across the chest, and taking the teen's denim shorts and brown flip-flop sandals. They also swapped the blue pieces of paper they were given when they entered the jail as a receipt for their belongings.
Around 4 a.m., Nava and Ramirez, posing as Altamirano, were released from cell five. They walked to the guard's window, where Ramirez handed the guard the receipt with Altamirano's name on it.
According to public security's Partida, the two guards on duty didn't compare the signatures on the claim tickets.
They also didn't check the photos on file for the two men. Had they looked, he said, they would have seen that the 30-year-old Ramirez, with his shortly cropped hair, didn't resemble the other man, who was 19 and had his hair shaved in a Mohawk.
"Mistakes were made," Partida said. "They are not easy to confuse."
Around 7 a.m., another guard noticed Ramirez was missing and alerted his boss.
By then, Ramirez and Nava had made their way to the home of a 25-year-old drug dealer, Huber Silvo Cano, a friend of Altamirano's.
Silvo didn't know Ramirez, but he let Ramirez change clothes there, and gave him a razor so he could shave his head and eyebrows, police said.
The three men later drove in Silvo's pickup to Guayabitos, a beach town about 60 miles north of Puerto Vallarta.
Nava and Silvo were arrested this week after Nava went to police and said that after they left the jail, Ramirez threatened to kill him. The men are now being held on charges of assisting the escape. Silvo also faces drug charges after police found powder cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs in his home.
Silvo and Nava told police they left Ramirez in Guayabitos and returned separately to Puerto Vallarta.
Police have been unable to track his whereabouts in the week since.
'This is a beautiful place'
Mexican authorities this week repeatedly stressed the quick action they took after the screw-up - comments intended as much to show their regret for what happened as to blunt the bad press over it, particularly in the United States.
Almost immediately after the escape, 11 jail employees were arrested. Nine of them have since been released. The other two - the warden and a guard who let Ramirez go - are being held in the state prison.
If the investigation reveals corruption, the men will be prosecuted, Partida said.
He also listed several changes he's made at the jail since last week, including better lighting in the cells, repositioning security cameras and mandating that guards verify every inmate who is released is the same person photographed at the time of booking.
In another detention center Thursday afternoon, police paraded Silvo - the young drug dealer who'd given Ramirez a lift out of town - before the media as a symbol of their aggressive investigative work.
After an officer unlocked his handcuffs, Silvo was placed against a white wall. Officers then stepped back as photographers snapped pictures from all angles and reporters peppered Silvo with questions.
In an office upstairs, the local solicitor of justice, Guillermo Martin Diaz Prudencio, insisted people shouldn't be afraid to travel to Puerto Vallarta.
"It's a safe city," he said.
Near the area where Parrish was killed, a store employee also worried about the impact the murder might have on the city's reputation, even as cruise ships sat docked a few hundred yards away and tourists continued to lounge by their hotel pools, many unaware of what happened the week before.
"This is a beautiful place," he said. "A lot of Americans live in Puerto Vallarta. A lot of Americans love Puerto Vallarta."
The man, who would not give his name for fear he would get in trouble with his boss for talking to the media, also said he hopes police catch Ramirez soon. When they do, he wishes they could take him to the United States, so he could face the death penalty.
"The most important is an innocent man died," he said. "The people of Puerto Vallarta say 'Why?' . . . All the people say 'Why?' "
How it all happened
Mexican authorities say that University of Colorado instructor Janet Graaff and her son, 21-year-old CU student David Parrish, visited a cash machine at Puerto Vallarta’s Plaza Marina to withdraw money to go furniture shopping. Two men who witnessed the transaction followed the Coloradans to the furniture store, accosted Graaff, and shot and killed Parrish when he tried to intervene. A pool of blood stains the road where Parrish died outside the furniture store. |
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