Echoes Of The Dead: A Month Later, No News On Why The Young Assistant District Attorney Died...Found Inside His Vehicle In Matamoros, Mexico...

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
Editor-In-Chief

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - In the aging, fat files of police departments across the country, they are listed as unsolved crimes. On television, they are referred to as cold cases. Always, they are rife with titillating tidbits of info that lead those poring over the material to craft a worthy conspiracy theory. A bullet hole in the low back of the neck indicating upward flight of the projectile and it's a dwarf doing the shooting. A butchering from behind with a hunting knife and it's the business partner. A dead-on pistol shot in the face and it's the wife unable to come to terms with her man's sexual infidelity.

The case of Arturo Jose Iniguez here has birthed a litany of theories.

The young assistant district attorney for Cameron County was barely 26 when his limp body was found at 10:30 p.m. last March 19th inside his gray, 2008 Jeep Patriot sport utility vehicle in the neighboring Mexican bordertown of Matamoros, along a quiet-looking street where malnourished, scraggly little boys often play stickball with makeshift baseballs made out of rolled-up socks and duct tape. How Iniguez found that particular street is anybody's guess. No one is talking. Not the investigating cops, and not his boss - District Attorney Armando Villalobos, shown in green-striped tie above.

They say Iniguez was despondent, but that has been thrown out as if describing the color of his vehicle or his casual, day-off shirt on the day he died, without proof or elaboration.

Some pointed to a comment Iniguez left before his mysterious death.

"We're the middle children of history, man," he wrote in his last days while adding a post to his Facebook page, quoting froma character in the movie, The Fight Club. "No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives."

One could make a shallow case for that being characterized as someone being depressed. But who knows? Facebook is famous for lies and posturing that makes its participants post both inanities in equal amounts as facts. What if it was just Iniguez wishing to use a favorite quote and nothing more?

But what's become especially grating is D.A. Villalobos and his decision to say little about Iniguez, the death, or the investigation. An autopsy of the young lawyer's body in Mexico revealed traces of an animal sedative in examined tissue. Villalobos accepted the possibility of suicide at first, but then sought a second autopsy to be conducted in this country. Nothing has been said about whether it was undertaken, or about its results.

The death remains that, just another weird death in Mexico with the barest of information, so weird that Iniguez's mother insists he died in a car accident.

Much has been made of family privacy, which is laudable, but this was a public servant who died while under the employ of a public entity. Iniguez was not just another ambulance chaser or bribe-provider in town; he was a defender of the public's side of things in court. His having a young wife and 2-year-old child seem at odds with suicide. Villalobos hasn't budged. He has quietly disdained disclosing his findings, odd as that sounds for a prosecutor. Assuaging the public he serves appears not to be his favored path on this particular case. Perhaps he wants the death to simply go away or be added to the slush pile of unsolved crimes. Rumors however, abound, too many of them to let that be Iniguez's legacy.

Villalobos, forever the coy, selective-prosecution D.A. with higher political ambition, owes the public a thorough investigation and complete disclosure of the findings - good or bad for his office or his image.

That some people in town openly theorize that Iniguez was killed by members of the drug cartels, that he chose suicide because of perceived office shenanigans, that he couldn't cope with a sizeable college debt. Most of that is absurd, but, as with plots on TV crime shows, it's become the juicy part of the story.

His is not an unsolved case - or a cold case - at this point.

This is now a sad case, and someone should be held accountable for the shoddy treatment afforded this young man. You'd think a speedy resolution of the manner and reason for his curious death would be uppermost on the minds of those who employed him and knew him...

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