Minutemen Associate Faces Death Penalty for Murder of 9 Year Old Latina

Finally, someone in the national, legacy, press is paying attention to this. Not that attention from a traditional news organization is needed to legitimize a story, but it’s about time. The New York Times published a story about the murder of 9 year-old Brisenia Flores this week.

Flores was shot to death during a robbery at her home in May of 2009. The suspects are a woman associate of the Minutemen group, the same bunch of folks who sit on lawn chairs and peer across the US-Mexico border in search of immigrants, and a guy she supposedly hired to help her pull off the heist. The truly heinous thing about all this, as if murder itself wasn’t enough, is the motive.

Prosecutors in Tucson , Arizona, say that the accused, Shawna Forde, 43, and her accomplice, Jason Bush, entered the Flores residence disguised as police officers. Once inside they ransacked the home in search of money – proceeds from the sale of marijuana. In the process Bush shot and killed Brisenia, her father and her mother.

According to the LA Times, other people associated with the Minutemen testified against Forde, calling her a loose cannon who had planned to rob local drug dealers in an effort to finance her border surveillance activity.

“This makes us drug dealers,” Robert Copley, …the former head of a Minuteman group in Colorado, recalled thinking when he heard Ms. Forde describe her plan at a Flying J truck stop in Colorado. Mr. Copley bowed out, and testified that he informed the F.B.I. of what Ms. Forde had in mind.
Prosecutors claim that, just weeks later, Ms. Forde did go through with the plan.
“I suspect there is not a lot of money to be made sitting on a lawn chair in the desert and calling the Border Patrol if you see an illegal alien,” a deputy county attorney, Rick Unklesbay, told a jury. “Shawna Forde, though, was going to finance her Blackwater, finance her crew.”

The trial is now in the hands of the jury. But the LA Times asks a pertinent question, one that we asked here at News Tacos weeks ago:

In the weeks since Tucson buried Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old victim of the shooting rampage outside a Safeway supermarket, a trial under way in the county courthouse here has struggled to account for the earlier murder of yet another child of the same age.

The national press has also struggled to justify why they haven’t paid attention to this case.

I’m told by people close to the case that there will be more trials to come, as people implicated will be accused and brought to trial.

News Taco will keep an eye on it for you.