Hispanics and crime

• By KIMBERLY VETTER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Mar 30, 2008 - UPDATED: Homicides 2007

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

When Vicente Moya was killed in Hammond four months ago he was $5,000 away from achieving his dream of building a house in Honduras for his wife and four children.

“His goal was to finish the house and have some extra money to open a business,” said Rosalva Martinez Padilla, 28, Moya’s wife of 10 years. “That was his dream. All he wanted was to be with his family.”

Bullets shattered Moya’s dream when he was shot during a botched robbery in the parking lot of his apartment on Martin Luther King Drive — in front of his wife and cousin.

A similar incident occurred Easter morning in Baton Rouge when Jesus Amilcar Gutierrez, from El Salvador, was gunned down during an attempted armed robbery near Gardere Lane. Two other Hispanic men were wounded by gunfire during a holdup the previous day in the same area.

East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s deputies arrested a juvenile and two men in the shootings. Moya’s murder remains unsolved.
Although law enforcement officials aren’t certain, some say criminals might be honing in on Hispanics because they view them as easy targets.

Michael Gonzales, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Louisiana, said some criminals see Hispanics as vulnerable because they have a propensity not to speak English, distrust law enforcement and carry a lot of cash.

A lot of Hispanics tend “to stay in the shadows,” which makes them attractive to those “who want to make an easy buck,” he said.

Casey Rayborn Hicks, an East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman, said deputies found no indication that there was a relationship between the victims and their attackers. There also is no evidence that the victims were involved in any criminal activity.

The number of Hispanic crime victims in southern Louisiana has grown with the influx of Central and South Americans into the area in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The rise in violence among East Baton Rouge Parish’s Hispanic community can be traced at least to last year when six of the parish’s murder victims were Hispanic men.

Those victims represent 5 percent of all 116 people killed in the parish in 2007, which is disproportionate to the number of Hispanics living in the area, according to the U.S. Census.

In 2006, 2.4 percent of East Baton Rouge Parish’s population was Hispanic, the latest Census numbers show. The percentage of Baton Rouge’s population that was Hispanic in 2000 was 1.7 percent.

But those numbers don’t include Hispanics who are in the area illegally.