William Grigg
Lew Rockwell
Between March 2006 and November 2010, Officer Daniel Alvarado of San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District Police was suspended four times. Four times he was informed bysupervisors that he faced “immediate termination.” For some reason, when it came time to fire Alvarado, his superiors just couldn’t bring themselves to pull the trigger. Alvarado displayed no similar scruples on November 12, 2010, when he murdered 14-year-old Derek Lopez, who had just taken part in a brief scuffle with another student.
Owing to his own troubled past, Lopez was a student at the Bexar County Juvenile Justice Academy. At around 4:30 PM on the fatal day, Lopez sucker-punched a 13-year-old classmate at a bus stop.
“He just hit me once,” the student later recalled in a sworn deposition. “It wasn’t a fight. It was nothing.”
Unfortunately, Alvarado happened to be prowling the intersection in his patrol car, and witnessed the trivial dust-up.
