January 7, 2007   
BY DAN E. WAY

The angry punch to his face didn't have a lasting effect on Eliseo Hernandez.

The lumps caused by fierce kicks to his body have long since disappeared.

But the terror of having three guns thrust against his body as he was beaten, threatened with death and robbed on Thanksgiving Day spawned lingering emotional trauma.

Hernandez's tale of terror is anything but unique in Durham. For a variety of reasons, many say, Hispanics are a lucrative, vulnerable and growing target for armed robbers.

The Hispanics also say most of the robbers are black. Of 17 Hispanics asked, all said they were either a robbery victim or knew one -- and that the assailants in every case were black.

An assistant Durham County district attorney supports their assertion, saying armed robbery of Hispanics here is chiefly a black-on-Hispanic crime.

Sleepless nights and a gnawing fear of again facing death at the point of a gun barrel are the mental barbs hooked into Hernandez's psyche, he said.

Retelling his experience is obviously painful -- his head hung low, mostly avoiding eye contact, his voice is an odd mixture of anger and shame.

But the immigrant from Guanajuato, Mexico, believes his life-threatening experience is little more than a statistic to police.

And in Durham, such statistics illustrate grave vulnerability -- nearly half of all robbery victims are Hispanic, although Hispanics represent only about 9 percent of the city's population, according to the 2000 census.

Robberies increased 58 percent during the first nine months of 2006 when compared with the same period in 2005, according to Deputy Police Chief Ron Hodge. Most involved stick-ups, and most of the victims were Hispanic, he said.

In July, August and September 2006, the most recent period for which statistics are available, 46 percent of all Durham robbery victims were Hispanic, police spokeswoman Kammie Michael has said.

"It's probably more like 90 percent," Hernandez said.

He believes that for every Hispanic robbery victim who reports the crime, at least one more does not.

A crowd of Hispanic men from his apartment complex in East Durham who gathered around to listen in on the open-air interview agreed with his assessment.

One man, who asked not to be identified, told of a Hispanic woman in the apartment complex who answered a knock at the door. She was greeted by gun-wielding men who burst into the apartment, thrust a pistol in her face and robbed her of $500 in cash as her children looked on.

Then he needled a Hispanic companion whose black hair was dyed blonde, saying, in good nature, he was trying to fool the robbers into thinking he was white so he would not be targeted.

"More and more blacks are robbing Hispanics because they carry money and it's easy," Hernandez said, citing a list of reasons it is a crime of opportunity.

Language barriers prevent many Spanish-speaking victims from coming forward, he said. Many Hispanics are undocumented aliens and fear deportation if they get involved in the justice system. Because they have no papers to stay in the country, they have a difficult time getting bank accounts, which is why they carry large wads of cash.

And there is a more fearful motive for noninvolvement.

"Somebody may see you talking to the police and tell the robber, and he will come back and kill you," Hernandez said.

Indeed, that is the frightful scenario with which he was confronted.

"Three black men armed with pistols came up to me and put the pistols in my chest. They threw me on the ground, punched me in the face and kicked me underneath a car," Hernandez said. "They said if I called the police they would kill me."

He and a Hispanic friend who also was beaten and robbed that night did call the police, but Hernandez said that was futile.

"Police don't do anything," he said.

Instead of posting more patrols in high-crime neighborhoods, police told him it was his fault for carrying so much money, and advised him to look out his windows to be vigilant of suspicious activity, he said.

"That's terrible," Frances Miranda-Watkins, a Spanish-speaking Durham County assistant district attorney, said of the advice Hernandez was given. "Who doesn't carry money in their pockets?"

Miranda-Watkins agreed that armed robbery of Hispanics is mostly a black-on-Hispanic crime.

"In the cases that I get that involve robberies, yeah," she said. There are some Hispanic-on-Hispanic robberies, "but that's not the general rule," she said, and she can't recall any white-on-Hispanic robberies.

Miranda-Watkins said she sometimes does outreach in Spanish-language media to educate Hispanics how the U.S. legal system works.

She tries to assure them that if they are victims and report a crime they will not be deported. She tells them Durham courts are exceptional because they have certified translators who can accurately repeat trial testimony in English.

And she has to assuage concerns about retribution.

"The more people who don't come forward and testify, that just aggravates the problem, whether you're Hispanic or not," Miranda-Watkins said.

Still, Maria Rodriguez is not certain whether she will be in court later this month to testify against the man who robbed her and her husband, Sergio Pulido, while they were working at La Vaquita, her brother's fresh produce store on Pickett Road.

"We don't understand much English," Rodriguez said. "We don't understand how the system works."

What is vivid to her is the heart-racing panic that shook her world the night an unwanted intruder arrived.

"About 8:30 at night a black man came in with a pistol and a bandana on his face. He was pointing his pistol at my head," she said.

Her husband, like her, a native of Veracruz, Mexico, was behind the counter.

"I just told him to do what they wanted," Rodriguez said.

What the robber wanted was the money -- $800 from the register and $200 from her purse -- and the keys to her van, which was stolen and used in two other robberies of Hispanic stores that night.

"But I felt lucky they didn't hurt me or hit me," Rodriguez said. "A few days later they robbed a store and an acquaintance of my brother was shot in the head and was in the hospital. They had to close the store" because there was nobody to operate it.

Guillermo Rivas of San Salvador, El Salvador, and his construction comrade, Edgar Alvarez, of Escuintla, Guatemala, had violent encounters about a year ago.

"I was walking to the store and two black men grabbed me by the arms and took the money out of my pockets," Rivas said. "One had a knife and one had a gun. They didn't hurt me," but lifted $250 off him that he needed for bills and food.

Alvarez's story is similar.

"I was coming back from the store and two black men approached me outside my apartment. One asked me for a cigar, and I told him I didn't have a cigar," Alvarez said.

"The other one looked away, then put a pistol to my head," rifling his pockets for $150, said Alvarez, a father of five children back in Guatemala. "They told me to be careful. If I didn't stop moving they would kill me. It's very dangerous here."

Now Alvarez, like Hernandez and other Hispanic robbery victims interviewed for this article, is frequently a prisoner in his own home.

"It's very rare that I leave my apartment at night," he said, especially when he doesn't have money.

"If you don't have money in your pocket, they'll kill you," Alvarez said. "You'll get a bullet or a knife."

Source: The Herald Sun