A Chronicle of Two Deaths Memory Holed
Bayou City Amnesia Strikes Again, but now we are part of a terrifying global trend.
I’d like to think that in most cities, if an arrest was finally made in a case of a mass shooting that wounded seven young Houstonians and killed two — including an aspiring filmmaker and straight-A student at the University of Houston — some local news outlet would mention that fact.
Well, in spite of the fact that I intentionally sat on my hands for an extra 24 hours, allowing the local media to catch up, none had. And so this is breaking news here on my lowly blog.
On August 31, Harris County Sheriffs arrested 22-year-old Louis Malik Santee, a.k.a “Rico 10K,” for his role in a December 27, 2019 drive-by shooting of a rap video shoot that killed 22-year-old Jonathan Alexis Jimenez of Spring and 20-year-old Gonzalo Andrew Gonzalez.
According to his family, Jimenez was:
Jonathan was a great, responsible young man always being goofy, taking pictures and being with his friends and family. He loved to shop, play video games and one of his dreams was to be an artist and professional gamer. He was a huge fan of the Dallas Cowboys, Houston Astros and the Houston Texans. He always loved to look his best from his appearance down to the shoes and cologne; he wanted to look and smell nice. He had a contagious smile and loved being around friends and family especially his daughter, Emma. He knew everyone and everyone loved him. He will be greatly missed but always loved by all.
According to his family, Gonzalez:
…attended Summer Creek High School, graduating in 2017. He later attended the Honors College at Lone Star, where he met the love of his life, his girlfriend, Emily. At the time of his passing, Gonzalo was a student at the University of Houston (Main Campus), majoring in Marketing. When not at work at the family business, he found joy in photography, filming videos, and caring for his beloved German Shepherd, Kali. He was truly blessed to have accomplished many of the goals and dreams he had set for himself, including the creation of two Houston-based businesses that would help him promote his work in photography and videography. Although he passed away at such a young age, we find comfort in knowing that Gonzalo was taken up to Heaven while doing what he loved, filming videos. He will truly be missed by all who knew him.
According to a Chronicle report in the immediate aftermath, one of those wounded — all Hispanic men ranging in age from 17 to 23 — had been shot in the head and was in critical condition.
This is one of things about these stories — ordinarily we would’t know what form that survival took. That victim could be anything from paralyzed from the neck down and only able to be fed through a tube to more or less okay. But because this victim was rapper Cashout Ace — the star of this ill-fated video — we can find him on Youtube, having come a long way, but obviously not all the way back to where he was before.
The Chron report went on to say that the video shoot was ambushed for reasons unknown. It went into the category of “beefs.” It took place in a godforsaken crumbling warehouse complex up in Greater Aldine, a sprawling northeast side most Houstonians at best regard with trepidation as they pass through en route to Intercontinental.
Gonzalez, the director, was simply hired by Cashout Ace. The two young men were not acquainted before the video shoot.
Whew. There is just something about this one particular mass shooting that has always stuck in my craw. Or several things….
One — only mass shootings with white victims seem to count as such. We shrug and accept such mayhem among the Brown and the Black as the natural order of things.
Two — who knows how much mention this one would have been given were it not for the fact that a rap video — no matter how underground — was the scene of the crime. On the one hand it sets it apart from typical night club parking lot madness and on the other it comforts some: “Well if they weren’t messing around with that rap music, they might be alive today. Thank Willie Nelson I have no truck with such stuff.”
Three — If an aspiring filmmaker with a straight-A average at UH with White skin had been one of the victims, there would have been much more outcry and publicity. If said director was a blonde and female, that would have gone quadruple. But no, it was just Gonzalo Gonzalez, boyfriend of Emily and master of Kali. Being from a barrio family, we can muster no more than a passing “What a shame” for his youthful demise, while others among us would say he played a stupid game and won a stupid prize for accepting the commission to shoot this video.
Four — And I mean come the fuck on, what other country in the western world is there where something like this could conceivably even happen, and in which of those countries would this not make the national news? Having lived in England for close to three years, I can assure you that a mass shooting with nine victims would be one of the lead items on the national news for a day or two and subsequently inspire little packs of reporters into the slums of Manchester, Birmingham, London, Liverpool and Glasgow to find out just what had gone so wrong in those places where something like this could occur.
And first on their mind would be how firearms could have gotten into the hands of young criminals. Because — I know this is weird, but…that is actually a valid question in the UK, and most other countries today. Here, it just goes unquestioned. “19-year-olds with as-yet not-quite filled-out cerebral cortexes owning guns? Of course they can own guns! This is America!”
Eh, the whole thing is so sadly American. As a society we shrug because the victims were Brown and the alleged perpetrator is Black. We don’t bother questioning how they got the guns. The least charitable and shallowest thinkers among us would chalk it all up to rap.
But this case brought none of these questions to the fore, because our media is woefully understaffed. I mean, maybe the Chronicle might do a deep dive into this case, have a reporter imbed with these sources for a few months and use these senseless killings in order to examine some or more of the issues I’ve raised in this post. Today? They just don’t have the resources. Their shop is now a revolving door of fresh j-school grads from all over America, who couldn’t tell you Jose Cruz from Julio Iglesias, much less Kathy Whitmore from Kathy Gifford. With the recent resignation of Lisa Gray, a huge percentage of the paper’s institutional memory — and by institution, here I mean Houston in general and not the Chron specifically — has taken yet another catastrophic hit.
When a paper loses institutional memory of its city, it becomes well-nigh useless. Such papers can’t connect dots. Their reporters and editors, knowing nothing of the tangled web of intrigue that is every big city (or small town, or even family unit) tend to believe the last person they talked to rather than hear each interview in the larger context of the city’s workings and history.
And I am aware that this shooting was not exactly earth-shattering news on the order of the ongoing Covid crisis or the retreat from Kabul, but it deserves more than a few man-on-the-scene reports from the TV stations and earnest just-the-facts accounts from the Chron. Which seems unlikely — Robert Downen, city desk reporter, wrote a fine on-the-scene account from the aftermath of this shooting, but a quick look at his current beat suggests that he has been assigned nothing but Covid stories of late.
Here is how he wrapped up his account:
Hour* after the shooting occurred, blood still stained the parking lot, and a pair of lights that were used for the video shoot were still standing. A bus shelter, nestled between the lot and the street that the assailants likely fired from, had four visible bullet holes. A nearby car was also struck.
The scene was otherwise quiet — save for an older group that arrived in the late-morning to pick up a vehicle and the leftover lights. Before departing, they each briefly stared over the bloody pavement, and some broke into tears.
(* typo was in the original. If you news consumers insist on clean copy, you are going to have to pay extry for that.)
And this used to be where the Press would swoop in — back when we had three investigative reporters and as many or more on general assignment — this is the kind of story we would have run on the cover with a 5000-word page turner that would have been as readable as it was necessary. We would have taken you to the world around that Aldine warehouse complex and tried to bring context to the lives on either end of those guns. What was the beef about? And who was Louis Malik Santee, and why did he feel compelled to throw his life away at age 20? And how did it take so long for an arrest to be made, and kudos to the cops who cared enough to stick with it this long.
Well, you can’t get any of that kind of coverage today because there’s just not enough money in journalism to support it. But as Townes used to say, cheer up, it only gets worse. As mor reporters lose jobs and more papers go out of business, we will get less and less coverage of the marginalized. Or of all life in general aside from which hot new restaurants in Houston or yet a-fuckin-nother listicle smugly informing “Newstonians” (lord how I hate that term) just how they should pronounce Kuykendahl.
My first response was "Breathless..aahhh". My second is that editors, politics and technology are not serving us well.
Presumably there is a lot of money to be made writing local click bait. Local journalism of substance, not so much, not enough to pay salaries, it seems.