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Answers to American's death in Tijuana remain elusive
By Matt Bean
TIJUANA, Mexico (Court TV) -- Steve Thomas threaded through the crowds packing the streets of Tijuana, no longer interested in the neon-bathed strip clubs, the all-you-can-drink bars and the tropical-themed discos that had lured him across the border hours before. It was late and his brother, Jayson Artis, was drunk and rowdy. Now, as the two sought safety from the Friday night carnival, the garage where they parked with a friend was nowhere in sight. And when Thomas whirled around, he found that his brother, too, had disappeared. "I thought he was just sitting down somewhere, resting. Or that maybe he turned down a different street," recalls Thomas, who was 16 at the time. "All of us were finished, but he was past drunk. I was very worried that he probably went to jail." Artis was found, but not by Thomas. At about 3 a.m. the next morning, August 2, 1998, a policeman discovered his bruised and bloodied body in an alley in Tijuana's rundown "Zona Norte" section. His head was heavily damaged, and his chest bore bruises and broken ribs. The official explanation was that Artis was killed in a hit-and-run accident. But for Artis' family, that story didn't add up. "I really believe it in my heart that the police killed my son," said Rose Arrington, Artis' mother. "There's no doubt in my mind. And for somebody to beat somebody like that they had to be so angry." Arrington has mulled these facts every day since her son's death: Artis, 20 when he died, was prone to belligerence when under the influence, and was extremely intoxicated that evening. He had already had two run-ins with the police that night, and was last seen in a patrol car with four officers. Official explanation notwithstanding, Artis' autopsy report showed that his lower body was almost entirely unscathed -- injuries many agree are inconsistent with a hit-and-run. The dust long ago settled in the Tijuana alley where Artis was found, a barren strip of dirt connecting two rows of car repair shops and abandoned buildings. And an investigation into his death stalled in 2000. But more than four years later, Artis' family still fears that the real story has been covered up by the Tijuana police department, and sloughed off in the shuffle of diplomacy by the American consulate. Tijuana: America's playland
It's only a five-minute walk through the twisting, cobblestone streets of Tijuana from the border to the major commercial strip, Avenida Revolucion. The street barkers signal one's arrival. "You want girls, amigo? We have the girls right here," say the clapboard-bearing strip-club hawkers. "Pills? Amigos, we have it for you," say the pharmacists, set off in their white lab coats from the men in the back streets who might say the same things and offer the same drugs, but at a premium. Because of its promise of a good time on the cheap, and liberal drinking laws, Tijuana has long been a favorite destination of college students such as Artis, who wanted one last hurrah for his visiting brother, Steve Thomas. A month before, Artis, a Norfolk, Virginia, native, wired Thomas the money to make the trip out to Van Nuys, where he was studying engineering. The brothers, who share a father, spent their time visiting local tourist sites. Tijuana, a two-and-a-half hour drive from Artis' apartment, was a must-see destination. "To a 16-year-old guy, the drinking and the women, it was all unbelievable," Thomas said. But the excess that is easily had in Tijuana comes at a price: one American citizen per day dies in Tijuana and the surrounding area of Baja California, according to Al Anzaldua, chief of the American Citizen Services (ACS) section in the Tijuana American consulate. No breakdown of the cause of deaths were available. Another three Americans per day are reported missing. It is the most active, and perilous, tourist destination in the world. That fact was lost on the brothers as they crossed the border with their older friend, Michael Justin, 27, under a red, white and green "MEXICO" sign at about 9 p.m. that Friday. They parked Justin's car in a three-story garage only a minute's walk from Avenida Revolucion, and headed for the strip. Their first stop was a hole-in-the-wall bar, the sort of place that pops up in varying incarnations all along the mile-long strip. The bouncer there laughed at Thomas' age, but let him pass. He wasn't as lucky at an all-you-can-drink bar next door, but Artis went in for a half hour while Thomas stayed outside with Justin. "We were just hopping," said Thomas. "Going from bar to bar." Affable and easy-going, Artis nonetheless had a reputation for getting rowdy if he drank too much, Thomas knew. Artis had spent a weekend in the Tijuana jail before, that time because of a confrontation in a club. So Thomas cautioned his brother. "Don't get drunk to the point where you get wild," he said. But Artis was well on his way by the time they hit the next bar, where waiters poured shots of tequila directly into the young men's mouths. When they made for the door, a waiter surprised them with a tab for the drinks. Artis had words with him. "We didn't know we had to pay for it. They were running up to us with the drinks," Thomas said. Justin convinced Artis to acquiesce. "We ended up paying for the drinks and leaving," Thomas said. The tone had been set, however. Artis had his first brush with the law at 11:30, when a pair of patrol officers found him in mid-relief, using a corner as a makeshift urinal. They handcuffed him and gave him the choice of paying them a $40 fine or heading to jail to pay his fine in court. The confrontation was interrupted by the crackle of a police radio as the officers were called away, and Artis was released. The brothers decided to separate from Justin, who wanted to stop at a cash machine and hit another bar. "I was thinking, 'Let's just hurry up and find the car,'" Thomas said. He squired his brother through the crowd, hoping to avoid further trouble. But just before 1 a.m., Artis bumped into a female police officer patrolling the strip. She bristled, and with her partner detained him in handcuffs. Artis was incensed. "F--- the policia!" he yelled. "They have been picking on us all night!" Thomas tried unsuccessfully to calm his brother. The male officer demanded Artis' gold watch and $30, but Artis refused. Thomas emptied his pockets for the officers, yielding about $40, and they continued on. Shortly thereafter, Artis was lost in the labyrinth of late-night Tijuana. "I was panicking," Thomas said. "I was 16 and from Virginia, and to be in Mexico at that time alone was frightening." Thomas searched for his brother for the next two hours, retracing their path through the crowd and ducking into side streets to scan the doorways for the slumped-over figure of his brother, resting. Eventually, he returned to the car to wait. Justin showed up at the car at about 3 a.m. with bad news: He saw Artis fly by in a police car with four officers shortly after 1 a.m. "I was petrified," said Thomas. "He kept on saying he was sure he had seen my brother in the back of that car." The two searched until 5 a.m., and then returned home to Van Nuys. Thomas had phoned home, or was safe in jail, they reasoned. The next day, they returned to Tijuana, visiting the police station, where there was no record of Artis' arrest, and the consulate, which had no information. It wasn't until Tuesday that the consulate called to tell Thomas that Artis had been found dead in the area known as "La Zona Norte." La Zona Norte"The North Zone" is a dusty sliver of Tijuana sandwiched between a concrete, trash-strewn drainage canal to the north and the bustling commercial district to the south. It's known as the seedy part of town. "Why you want to go there? You want smack, you want crystal? You can get anything you like," said a grizzled man outside a bar on Avenida Revolucion, offering directions to a reporter. "But I can get some of that for you here, if you're looking for it." La Zona Norte could never be confused with the tourist section. Today, the alley where Artis was found still seems like the end of the world. A group of homeless people sift through the dirt, shoving a shopping cart laden with rags past a broken-down van. One man hobbles up on crutches, an unlit cigarette bobbing in his lips. "What you need, amigo?" he asked. To end up there in the middle of the night, one would have to desert the balloon-festooned restaurants and clubs of Avenida Revolucion, head past the Hard Rock Cafe Tijuana (the exclamation point at the end of the strip), and walk at length past a desolate stretch of buildings. Blocks past that, where some structures sit vacant and vandalized, is the street connecting Calle Coahuilla with the intersection of Calle Baja California and Avenida Revolucion. It is a place nearly anyone would avoid, especially at three in the morning when Artis was found. When Thomas received word that his brother was dead, he called Artis' mother in Norfolk, and Rose Arrington called her sister, Teena Martin-Smith, in Los Angeles for help. "This is just a mistake," Martin-Smith remembers thinking. "It's Tijuana, things happen. Somebody must have robbed him and they found his ID on that person when they died." Arrington was so distraught that she checked herself into the hospital later that night. Martin-Smith traveled to Tijuana to view the body. Artis' face was badly cut, and his jaws and nose broken. One eye was sunken into his skull. His ribs were broken, and one lung was punctured. "When he pulled that sheet back, I just lost it," Martin-Smith said. "'My God, who could do this to somebody's child?' I thought." His legs were uninjured. "He had some scratches on his leg but it wasn't deep or anything," recalls embalmer Jose Martinez of Funeraria del Carmen, the funeral home where Artis' body was later taken. "Usually people that have been hit by a car have fractures, and he didn't have any. I think he was beaten and dumped outside of a car." This dovetailed with what Martin-Smith had heard from the coroner -- that a car accident was an unlikely cause of death -- and shifted the focus to Justin's late-night sighting of Artis in police custody. So Martin-Smith, who ran a staffing agency out of Los Angeles, began a long campaign to explain her nephew's death. The bureaucracy of a murder investigationIf an American in Tijuana gets killed, kidnapped, arrested or assaulted, Al Anzaldua, the American Citizen Services chief, is one of the first to hear about it. From a hillside office overlooking the city, Anzaldua and his team try to help Americans navigate Tijuana, and help the local government handle Americans. Most of the time, said Anzaldua, that means helping them deal with trouble. "Tijuana is a place where Americans think they can do things they can't get away with in the United States," said the official. "But they get in trouble. You have the right to walk around at 3 a.m. with money hanging out of your pockets, but that doesn't mean it's smart." According to Anzaldua, his office processes five American arrests per day -- most for minor infractions such as urination or damage to public property. But it's also Anzaldua's job to investigate suspicious deaths and kidnappings. He drops a stack of file folders onto his desk to punctuate his point: all are alleged incidents of police corruption. One woman was bruised by officers; a man said they fleeced him of $300, and so on. Most of the claims dissolve for one reason or another, Anzaldua explains. But every so often, said the official, "you'll think, well wait a minute, what is going on here?" Artis' case raised such eyebrows in 1998. Responding to Arrington's request for assistance, Anzaldua's predecessor, Lisa Gamble-Barker, stewarded the case through local channels before moving on to another office in 2001. In any sort of foul-play allegation, ACS brings the problem to the attention of the appropriate Mexican authority. "We'll take it as high as we need to go," said Anzaldua. "But we have to depend on the Mexicans," he said. "We have no jurisdiction." Protocol dictates that the Mexican government invite the FBI to investigate. But the invitation was never extended in this case. The FBI can still act as a liaison, helping the family and any American witnesses provide statements and evidence that might convince the Mexican police to conduct their own investigation. That's what Norfolk, Virginia, agent Michael Freeman was charged with. The first hurdle, said Freeman, who was assigned to the bureau's antiterrorism branch, was the lack of a body. Martin-Smith had cremated Artis' body to cut down on the spiraling costs of sending it back across the border. Without a body, a sophisticated medical examination, which could determine whether Artis' injuries were caused by the butt of a gun or by the bumper of a car, could not be performed. "That's the most important piece of evidence," noted Freeman. "If there's one thing that could have convinced folks on both sides of the border that there was foul play, it was that body." What remained, then, was a crude autopsy report, and the suspicion engendered by the observations of Steve Thomas and Michael Justin. Neither were enough for the Tijuana police, not until the Mexican airing of an "Unsolved Mysteries" segment detailing Artis' death. After the broadcast, the department's assistant internal affairs chief, Marco Quintero, compiled a binder of 205 photographs of Tijuana municipal police officers and delivered it to the American consulate. The binder, said Freeman, "was pivotal." On July 26, 1999, Thomas visited the agent in his Norfolk office to view the photos. Thomas immediately selected a photo of a female officer with the same ponytail, uniform and facial features of the woman Artis tangled with in the crowd that night. "I am about half and half sure that this is the same woman my brother bumped into," he told Freeman. He also tentatively pointed to a male officer as the one who apprehended Artis for urinating in public. "He wasn't very confident of his IDs," recalled Freeman, "In fact, I wouldn't go so far as to call them identifications." And Michael Justin, who was sent the binder in California, was unable to identify any of the officers. Calls by Courttv.com to the Tijuana police department and Tijuana's spokesperson for public safety were not returned, but Freeman speculates the evidence just wasn't convincing enough. An investigation was never opened. "I think in their minds, there wasn't enough there," Freeman said. Adding to Thomas' tenuous identifications was the disappearance of Quintero, the internal affairs officer who seemed willing to help. "You had someone with a heart, and I don't know if he had the permission of his department," said Freeman. "I can only surmise he overstepped his bounds." Artis' mother said that the ACS consul at the time, Lisa Gamble-Barker, stopped returning her calls after Thomas identified the officers. And Freeman was forced to close his own work on the case in 2000, the final note in a decrescendo of effort. Today, the official cause of death for Jayson Artis remains the same as it was on August 2, 1998: "Politraumatismo," or multiple traumas. "The official report was that he was hit by a vehicle," said Anzaldua, reading from a one-page document on his desk. "Bad cops get away with it sometime," he said. "It happens in the U.S., and it happens here." Neither the FBI nor ACS have ruled out further investigation. "If anything came up, I'd reopen it in a heartbeat," said Freeman. But what might it take to spur further inquiry? New evidence? A confession? Today, Arrington's only hope is that someone with knowledge of her son's death might come forward with vital information. She has made hundreds of calls and sent as many letters to the consulate, senators and representatives. She had to overcome a language barrier and a massive diplomatic bureaucracy, all at a remove of thousands of miles. Eventually she just stopped calling. "I don't want it to take my life like that," she said. The shrine she keeps in her home -- an urn with her son's ashes and some pictures of him in life -- reminds her daily of her son's demise. "Jayson loved to drink and party, but he was a good kid. He didn't deserve to die like that."
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