Quannel X with bodyguard (red hat) who has been trained to throw
his lips in front of Quannel to protect against sniper attack.
A grand jury’s decision to clear a suburban Houston homeowner for shooting to death two men he saw burglarizing his neighbor’s home is not the end of the polarizing case, the fiancee of one of the two men said Tuesday.
"This is not over. It’s not over by a longshot," said Stephanie Storey, the fiancee of Hernando Riascos Torres.
Storey said she was pondering her legal options, including filing a civil lawsuit.
Torres, 38, along with Diego Ortiz, 30, were fatally shot by Joe Horn, a retired grandfather, after he saw them crawling out the windows of a neighbor’s house in the Houston suburb of Pasadena, carrying bags of the neighbor’s possessions.
Horn’s attorney has said his client shot the two men in November out of fear for his life when they came into his yard and threatened him.
But Storey, while not condoning what her fiancee and the other man did, called the shootings "premeditated murder" because Horn should have waited for police to handle the situation.
Horn, 62, called 911 and but ignored the dispatcher’s repeated requests to stay inside, saying he was "gonna kill ‘em." Horn confronted the men with a 12-gauge shotgun and shot both in the back.
Autopsy reports released Tuesday show the two men were shot in the back, arms and shoulders
Torres’ cause of death was listed as coming from a shotgun wound of the torso and the area around the upper left arm and shoulder, while Ortiz’s death came from a shotgun wound to the neck and torso.
"I’m very surprised that these two lives had no value, that someone can take the law into their own hands and shoot them down like animals and absolutely get away with it. I’m more than angry right now," Storey said.
Community activists, who denounced the grand jury’s decision on Monday, said they planned to stage a demonstration outside the Harris County District Attorney’s office next week.
Community activist Quannel X accused the district attorney’s office and the justice system in Harris County of being racist and broken and needing to be fixed.
Torres and Ortiz were unemployed illegal immigrants from Colombia. Horn is white. Torres had been deported to Colombia in 1999 after a 1994 cocaine-related conviction.
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