One Friday morning in July of 1990,

Cecil Moschewa walked into Houston Police Department headquarters,

ready to take on the pile of cases that had stacked up on his desk.

But there wouldn't be time for old cases today.

Because of the Chicano Squad's rotation, the next homicide that came in that

required a Spanish-speaking detective would be his.

As he got closer to his desk on the third floor though,

he could feel all eyes on him.

A young woman's brutalized body had been found overnight.

I remember some of the cases that really hit me real bad,

real hard are the female cases. They were real hard.

Norma Torres had been raped and smothered with a pillow

and left for dead inside her apartment.

White homicide detectives had initially been called out.

They made this scene and they say, well, there are a lot of Spanish speakers live out there

and we can't communicate and we're going to pass it over to the Chicano squad.

It's a Hispanic neighborhood.

That was their way of, we don't want the case.

We can't solve it, but we'll give it to you, because this is Hispanic. That's the way it was.

Norma Torres was 18, about the same age as Cecil Moschewa's oldest daughter.

Her common-law husband, George Davila, had come home from work on Thursday night

and discovered her dead inside their apartment on the bedroom floor.

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