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Girl takes stand at murder trial
Published July 1, 2009
Editor's note: The following story has been corrected after its publication. Sergio Mendoza-Villa was killed after a truck hit him and a crowd of people March 8, 2008. A story in Wednesday’s edition of The Facts misspelled the victim’s name.
ANGLETON — A timid 7-year-old girl testified Tuesday she was riding her bike near a group of people when a truck came up behind her and hit her.
“It knocked me down and my father also,” she said.
After she fell down, the truck backed up and went through the crowd again, she said.
“The man was coming back and forth, back and forth,” she said.
The girl testified Tuesday in the murder trial for Salvador Rodriguez, 60, who is accused of running his 1983 Ford truck into a crowd at a trailer park in the 3900 block of CR 48 north of Iowa Colony on March 8, 2008, killing Sergio Mendoza-Villa and injuring four others.
If convicted, Rodriguez faces up to life in prison.
Her head barely visible above the witness stand, the girl answered through an interpreter because she speaks mostly Spanish. The girl said she recognized the truck but did not answer when prosecutors asked her who owned the truck.
Rodriguez’s attorney, Michael Garza, said some men in the crowd beat his client before the incident and that Rodriguez wanted to get away from the scene that night.
“He was beaten, he was scared,” Garza said. “He got mad and drove his truck into a crowd. He was simply trying to leave.”
But prosecutors told jurors Rodriguez, who did maintenance for the trailer park, had a disagreement with some men in the crowd before the incident.
“The defendant was angry because of that altercation,” prosecutor Jennifer Dunne said. “He drives through the crowd. He backs up again, tries again.”
In a 911 call played for the jury Tuesday, Rodriguez told a dispatcher seconds after the incident that he had hit somebody after he drove into the crowd.
“I had to run,” Rodriguez said. “I had to run. They were beating me up. I’m an old man.”
Rodriguez said in the recording that he had blood coming out of his mouth and that he was “just beat up.”
“I’m still here,” he said. “I ain’t going to run away. Get them help before me.”
The girl’s father also testified Tuesday through an interpreter that he stood in the crowd when he saw a cloud of dust and a flash before he was hit.
“I just saw the bright lights,” he said.
Another man said he saw lights approaching the crowd before the truck ran over the right side of his body.
“I fell on the ground and I woke up at the hospital,” he said. “It was coming fast. There was a lot of dust.”
Both men denied hurting Rodriguez before they were hit.
Police and medical personnel testified Tuesday they arrived at a chaotic scene with several injured people.
“All you could hear was screaming and crying,” Brazoria County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Hargrave said.
Hargrave said he put Rodriguez into a patrol car after the defendant walked up to the scene while EMS personnel tried to care for the injured.
“He had a little bit of blood on his mouth,” Hargrave said.
Fred Ortiz worked as an EMS supervisor for Pearland that night and said there were several injured people who needed care. Mandozvilla already had died by the time EMS arrived, he said.
“It became a very intense scenario,” Ortiz said. “Some of the people on the scene were hostile because we were not taking care of someone.”
Testimony is set to resume at 9 a.m. today in District Judge Robert May’s courtroom at the Brazoria County Courthouse in Angleton.
John Tompkins covers Brazoria County courts for The Facts. Contact him at (979) 849-8581.
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