Remembering Brisenia & Raul Flores.....

It seems people have largely forgotten the events that took the life of 9 year old Brisenia Flores and her father one year ago today, an event largely ignored by the media.

At this hour, on this day, a group of American terrorists, calling themselves Minutemen American Defense, banged on the door of a residence in the 36000 block of Mesquite Road in Arivaca Arizona. Dressed in paramilitary camo and identifying themselves as law enforcement personnel, they demanded entry.

The father, Raul, made the fatal mistake of questioning why one of the “officers” weapon was wrapped in electrical tape. He was shot in the chest, point blank four times while his 9 year old daughter watched in horror.

Her final words were, “Why did you shoot my daddy”, before she was briefly interrogated and then shot point blank in the face twice.

The shooter, Jason Bush, acting under orders from Shawna Forde, then proceeded to try and murder the mother, Gina, who was on the phone to 911. She shot back wounding Bush and saving her own life in the process. The older sister was staying with her grandmother in another town close by and was spared.

The reason for this crime? Shawna Forde needed money to fund her “border operations” and thought she would find it in the Flores home.

There’s not much one can say about someone they never knew, but the impish smile of Brisenia, is seared into the mind of many, and there is many of us that will never forget her.

She was only 9 when Forde and her companions took it upon themselves to end her short life. She hadn’t lived long enough to make her mark on the world. She was just a child, loved by her mother, father and older sister, and by her friends at the elementary school she attended in Arivaca.

Just a child, murdered because Shawna Forde could not leave any witnesses to her crime.

Forde and her cohorts remain in the Pima County Jail facing multiple counts, including capitol murder. Forde continues to proclaim her innocence saying she is a VICTIM of a government conspiracy. She has allegedly filed a multi count complaint with the ACLU protesting her incarceration as illegal and inhumane.

We continue to ask, what about the rights of Brisenia Flores and her father Raul? In the mind of Shawna Forde and others of her ilk, they were Mexican (American) and therefore worthless and expendable. Sadly, that attitude still prevails along the border in Arizona today.

re-posted from Immigration Clearinghouse.org
http://immigrationclearinghouse.org/rem ... ear-later/

 

No they saw Raul Flores driving an SUV with fancy rims and automatically assumed since he was Mexican that he must be a drug dealer, so they followed him home and attempted to rob him to finance their white's only revolution.

 

At the Courthouse: Gripping audio and testimony offered at Forde trial

By Kim Smith Arizona Daily Star | Posted: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 8:33 am

The first person to testify in the death penalty trial of Shawna Forde was Tanya Remsburg, the woman who handled Gina Gonzalez's 911 call.

Forde is on trial on charges alleging she orchestrated a home invasion that resulted in Gonzalez being shot and Gonzalez's husband, Raul Junior Flores, and daughter, Brisenia, 9, being killed in May 2009.

Remsburg was called to the stand to lay the foundation for the dramatic and seemingly-never-ending call placed shortly after 1 a.m. May 30.

"Somebody just came in and shot my husband and daughter," Gonzalez tells Remsburg.

As she pleads for help and starts to tell Remsburg details of what has happened, she suddenly starts yelling.

"They're coming back! They're coming back in!"

At least five gunshots are heard before Gonzalez yells out "Get the (expletive) out of here!" and more gunshots ring out. (She later asks if her shooting at the gunman will be "held against her" and Remsburg laughs and tells her it was clearly self-defense.)

When she gets back to the phone, Gonzalez again pleads for Remsburg to hurry.

"They shot my husband and they shot my daughter and they shot me. Oh my God, I can't believe this is happening."

Later, defense attorney Eric Larsen kindly tells Gonzalez that he understands she's just been through a horrific experience, but questions why there are discrepancies between Gonzalez's 911 conversation and her testimony.

For example, she told Remsburg she wasn't paying attention to whether the female home invader was wearing a hat, but now insists she was not.

Gonzalez said she just couldn't understand the significance of Remsburg's questions at the time so wasn't thinking about what she was saying. She said all she was concerned about was getting help.

Also testifying Tuesday was U.S. Border Patrol Agent Don Williams.

Williams and two other BP agents went to Gonzalez's Arivaca home to provide backup for the Pima County Sheriff's Department.

He was the second one in the door and he immediately saw Raul Junior Flores dead on the couch.

"It was pretty obvious he was dead. He was non-responsive and from his expression it was obvious he was gone," Williams said.

He also knew immediately that Brisenia had died from at least one gunshot wound to the head.

When he found Gonzalez bleeding on the kitchen floor he "nudged" her gun away from her with his foot, not knowing exactly who she was.

Larsen is expected to finish questioning Gonzalez today.

David Winston, a medical examiner, will testify about the autopsies today, too.

http://azstarnet.com/news/blogs/courtho ... 03286.html

 

Re-posted from Hatewatch & http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- ... wna-forde/

Shawna Forde: Beautician, Vigilante, Killer?

by Terry Greene Sterling

Shawna Forde faces the death penalty as closing arguments begin in one of the strangest trials in Arizona history. Terry Greene Sterling on the accused’s surprising endgame.

For Shawna Forde, a 43-year-old beautician-turned-border vigilante, the moment of truth is at hand. For months, Forde, a Minuteman charged with masterminding a 2009 home invasion in which 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her dad, Raul, were slaughtered on the Arizona border, has maintained her innocence and pushed her lawyers to let her testify on her own behalf. But now, as one of the most bizarre and controversial murder trials in Arizona history draws to a close at Pima County Superior Court in Tucson, Forde has decided not to take the witness stand. It is the ultimate legal gamble. If Forde, who has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted first-degree murder, and several home-invasion-related crimes, is convicted, she could get the death penalty.


Sterling Minuteman Trial Defendant Shawna Forde attends her murder trial in Pima County Superior Court in Tucson, Arizona on February 8. (Jonathon LeFaive / TheLookingGlass.org)

Forde’s attorney, Eric Larsen, is expected during closing arguments beginning Thursday to portray Forde as braggart whose grandiose rants about stealing drugs and money from dealers in order to finance her tiny group, Minuteman American Defense, were nothing more than a needy woman’s cry for attention.

Larsen will contend that Forde wasn’t even at the crime scene—a small mobile home in tiny Arivaca, a community that sits on a drug- and human-smuggling corridor about 11 miles north of the Mexican border. What’s more, Larsen will suggest that Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik’s deputies arrested the wrong suspect.

But prosecutors, who’ve thrown a kitchen’s sink worth of evidence and testimony at the jury, will counter that testimony from Brisenia’s mom, Gina Gonzalez (who survived the killing spree by playing dead), along with testimony from Minutemen-turned-FBI snitches, a local drug dealer, cops, neighbors and even Forde’s own sister all prove the accused masterminded and participated in the home invasion.

“Beyond a reasonable doubt, Shawna Forde is guilty of these crimes,” prosecutor Kellie Johnson said at the trial.

Forde texted her daughter.

The Forde defense team will be sowing the seeds of doubt. They’ll play up the fact that Gonzalez couldn’t say for sure that Forde was the “mean” stout Anglo woman in camouflage, who, along with a tall Anglo gunman in blackface, barged into her trailer early on the morning of May 30, 2009, under the pretense of being law-enforcement officers in search of fugitives. Gonzalez, the prosecution’s chief witness, couldn’t pick Forde out of a photo lineup shortly after the murders. Now, she says Forde looks like the woman who barked orders to the killer and two others who futilely searched the trailer and surrounding property for drugs and money. Some jurors wiped tears from their eyes as Gonzalez recounted eight minutes of terror that changed her life forever. Raul was shot, she said, after he questioned whether the intruders were real law-enforcement officers. Next, the assailant shot Gonzalez, who played dead on the floor. Gonzalez heard her husband’s death rattles after he was shot five more times. She heard the gunman calmly reload and shoot Brisenia twice in the head as the child pleaded for her life. After the gunman and woman left the trailer, Gonzalez called 911 and begged for help for her dying daughter. But the woman came back in the trailer, saw Gonzalez alive, and exited quickly. Knowing she would be murdered, Gonzalez crawled into the kitchen and shot at her male assailant with her husband’s gun. He ran away. That gunman, prosecutors argue, was Jason Bush.



He’s a suspected serial killer from the Pacific Northwest with white-nationalist ties, a prison record, and a fake military ID. Forde’s other alleged accomplice, Arivaca resident Albert Gaxiola, reportedly wanted Raul Flores killed because he was “competition” in the drug trade. Both Gaxiola and Bush have pleaded not guilty and face separate trials this year. Although no DNA or other physical evidence linked Forde to the actual crime, prosecutors say a partial DNA sample of hers was found on a ring that, along with other jewelry belonging to Gonzalez, was discovered in Forde’s orange Honda when she was arrested near Sierra Vista, Arizona, about two weeks after the murders. (Forde later contacted her son and asked him to say he had given her the jewelry, or recognized it, a Pima County detective testified.)

Some colorful characters added to the strange environment surrounding the trial. Two Colorado Minutemen appeared at different times at court dressed in what appeared to be a uniform— wraparound dark glasses, white Western shirts, Wrangler jeans, tooled leather belts, and cowboy boots. Self-described “bail bondsman and fugitive recovery agent” Robert Copley, Sr. and his friend Ron Wedow both testified they met with Forde at a Flying J truck stop in Byers, Colorado, about two weeks before the murders.

Wedow already knew Forde, and had attended a 2007 “operation” in search of migrants she supervised near Sasabe, Arizona. He suspected she was a secret government agent trying to set him up, he testified, because she once took his picture against his wishes and refused to return it. He found her braggadocio about rocket-propelled grenades offputting. He wouldn’t let her ride on his ATV.

Two years later, at the truck stop, Forde attempted to recruit Wedow and Copley for an “operation” that involved “interrupting cartels” near Arivaca the following September, Copley testified, adding that Forde did not speak about killing anyone during the truck-stop huddle. The Minutemen figured Forde might set them up if they participated in the scheme, so when Forde pushed up the “op” date and invited them to come to Arivaca in late May, they declined. After the murders, they informed the FBI of the strange meeting.

Forde, dressed in conservative business-casual pants ensembles purchased by her defense team at Goodwill and Savers, sat quietly throughout the trial. No family members showed up at the trial, except for her sister, who testified against her, saying she had bragged about stealing drugs and money to fund her Minuteman group just weeks before the murder occurred.

An ardent Forde supporter, a “citizen reporter” named Laine Lawless, was barred from the courtroom because she was a potential witness. Once during the trial, Lawless sneaked into the courtroom costumed in a wig and dark glasses. Still raw from the Tucson shootings that killed six and injured 13 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, deputies were in no mood for bizarre behavior. They surrounded Lawless as she argued loudly with Judge John Leonardo, who ordered her not to set foot in the courthouse until the trial ended.

Forde, who is divorced, has two adult children, a daughter and a son. On the day of the murders, prosecutors say, Forde texted her daughter, Jaszmin Eddy: “Whatever goes down I’m in deep know I love you make me proud and do something good with your life I’ll call in a week God bless you Jasz.”

The events of the next few days will determine how much of Jaszmin’s life Shawna Forde will be around to enjoy.

Terry Greene Sterling is an award-winning Arizona-based journalist and author of 'ILLEGAL; Life and Death in Arizona's Immigration War Zone'. Visit her on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/ILLEGAL-L ... 0783110524 , or her website, http://www.terrygreenesterling.com/

 

I am against it 100% no matter what....

 

Shawna Forde, Anti-Immigration Vigilante, Convicted Of Killing Nine-Year-Old Girl And Her Father In Arizona

WASHINGTON -- An Arizona anti-illegal immigration activist was convicted on Monday of killing two Latinos during a 2009 raid: nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul Flores. The killer, Shawna Forde, is a member of the Minutemen, which patrols the southern border vigilante-style to detect illegal entry into the country.

Although the shootings were never classified as a hate crime, Latino groups argue the murders reflect growing anti-immigrant sentiment within the United States. The details are chilling: Forde and two others entered the Flores home, allegedly looking for a million-dollar drug stash that never materialized, and shot both of Brisenia Flores' parents before turning the gun on the child.

As her mother played dead, Brisenia Flores said, "Please don't shoot me," before being shot twice in the head.

A jury convicted Forde of planning and executing the raid that led to the deaths of Raul and Brisenia Flores, and of the attempted murder of Gina Gonzales, the child's mother (she survived the attack). Forde was also convicted on two counts of aggravated assault and counts of burglary, armed robbery and aggravated robbery.

The jury will announce Forde's sentence on Thursday; her alleged accomplices, Albert Robert Gaxiola and Jason Eugene Bush, still await trial.

Joaquin Guerra, campaign director for Latino activism group Presente.org, told HuffPost the conviction is "justice for a little girl whose death was ignored by the mainstream media." The case largely escaped the notice of major news outlets until a few weeks ago, when a number of national news sources covered Forde's trial.

Few politicians spoke out against the murders, which occurred in a state that later passed the hotly-contested SB1070 immigration law and is now considering a bill that would deny citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants.

Latinos organized to bring attention to the Flores killings, including a campaign by Presente.org to shed light on the case.
Story continues below

"What we have shown is that Latinos are watching, and if people and parties want the Latino vote, they will have to speak out against things like this," Guerra said. "We hope her death wasn't in vain and that it serves as an example of what can happen when the types of conditions that are in Arizona are allowed to go unchecked and are legitimated as serious policy issues."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/1 ... 23206.html

 

Arizona Jury Hands Nativist Murderer Shawna Forde Death
Posted in Anti-Immigrant, Extremist Crime by Mark Potok on February 22, 2011

Shawna Forde, the anti-immigrant vigilante leader who orchestrated the murder of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter, will receive the death penalty, a Pima County, Ariz., jury decided today.

The decision is binding on the judge hearing the case.

The case of Forde, a one-time member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps who went on to found her own Minuteman American Defense (MAD) group, didn’t get much attention from the national mainstream media. But among immigrant rights groups, Forde has become a symbol of the vicious hatreds that seems to lie just beneath the surface of the contemporary nativist movement. Forde targeted the family in the hope of stealing money to fund her MAD organization.

Two followers of Forde, Albert Gaxiola and Jason Bush, are scheduled to be tried separately later this year.

Forde was convicted on Feb. 14 of two counts of murder for the killing of Raul Flores and his daughter, Brisenia, in May 2009, along with the attempted murder of the child’s mother. She was also convicted of two counts of aggravated assault and one count each of aggravated robbery, armed robbery and burglary.

Forde led her two followers into the Flores home in Arivaca, Ariz., believing that Raul Flores was a drug dealer who would have plenty of cash on hand. Prosecutors have said that Bush was the gunman and first shot Flores dead and then shot his wife in the leg. He then allegedly walked over to Brisenia, who was sleeping with her puppy on the couch, shooting her twice in the head at close range.

Forde was once well known on the nastier end of the nativist movement, and in fact hobnobbed with many of its leaders. After her arrest, however, most of her former friends in the movement ran from her as fast as their feet could take them, suggesting that they had actually never really liked her at all

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/02/2 ... #more-5831

 

The Arizonification of America

By Mark Potok, Director, Intelligence Project

When even leading conservatives worry out loud about the right-wing vitriol and demonizing propaganda so commonplace in contemporary America, you've got to be concerned about where our country is headed.

This January, former President George W. Bush, speaking in a question-and-answer session at Texas' Southern Methodist University, warned that the nation seemed to be reliving its worst anti-immigrant moments. "My point is, we've been through this kind of period of isolationism, protectionism, nativism" before, he said. "I'm a little concerned that we may be going through the same period" again.

In a column around the same time, conservative commentator Linda Chavez, a Fox News analyst and former Reagan White House official, warned against new nativist efforts to end birthright citizenship. "Now, egged on by radical population control groups, some Republicans want to reinterpret the Constitution and 11 decades of jurisprudence to subvert the 14th Amendment," she wrote. "They are on a fool's errand that will do great damage to the Republican Party."

Roll Call executive editor Morton Kondracke wrote the same month that we are seeing "the Arizonification of America," a reference to the state that last year passed the harshest anti-immigrant law in memory. "It has become a state of Minuteman vigilantism, death threats against politicians and judges, talk-radio demagoguery, and bullying of Latinos and rival politicians," he said.

And neoconservative Bill Kristol, writing this February, worried about the "hysteria" in contemporary conservativism that he sees exemplified in a particularly voluble Fox News host. "When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society," Kristol wrote. "He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s."

Given these warnings from leading conservatives, it is not surprising that the Southern Poverty Law Center's latest count found that the number of hate groups operating in America last year had risen to 1,002 from 932 in 2009. The number of nativist vigilante groups was up, too, from 309 in 2009 to 319 in 2010. And there was truly explosive growth in the antigovernment "Patriot" movement, which added 312 new groups last year, skyrocketing 61% from 512 in 2009 to 824 last year.

As we explain in this issue, this dramatic growth of the radical right for the second consecutive year is related to anger over the changing racial make-up of the country, the ailing economy and the spreading of demonizing propaganda and other kinds of hate speech in the political mainstream.

The white-hot political atmosphere is not limited to hard-line nativist politicians, conspiracy-mongering cable news hosts, or even openly radical hate groups. During the same month when most of these conservative commentaries were written, the nation witnessed an extraordinary series of events that highlighted the atmosphere of political extremism.

On Jan. 8, a Tucson man opened fire in a parking lot on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, killing six people, critically wounding the congresswoman and badly injuring another 12 people. Giffords' assailant appeared to be severely mentally ill, but he also seemed to have absorbed certain ideas from the radical right, including the notion that the federal government is evil.

Six days later, a neo-Nazi named Jeffrey Harbin was arrested in Arizona for possessing 12 grenade-like devices packed with ball bearings — "to maximize human carnage," as a federal prosecutor put it. A member of the National Socialist Movement, Harbin was heading for the border when he was arrested.

Three days after that, on Jan. 17, police in Spokane, Wash., found and defused a sophisticated anti-personnel bomb that had been hidden along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. Officials said they were looking into local hate groups as part of their search for the would-be mass murderer.

And on Jan. 24, police in Michigan arrested a man in a car loaded with M-80s and other explosives in a parking lot outside one of the nation's largest mosques, packed at the time with 500 mourners at a funeral. He was charged with making a terroristic threat and possessing explosives with unlawful intent.

We are living in a deeply polarized and dangerous moment, and that may be nowhere more obvious than in the state of Arizona, as Mort Kondracke pointed out. Perhaps no one captured that better than Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, speaking at a press conference after the Tucson assassination attempt.

"Look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government," the sheriff said. "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous and, unfortunately, Arizona has become sort
of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Sadly, much of the country is following Arizona's lead.

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/i ... r=HW022411

 

We recorded that a couple of days before the Tucson massacre....

 

Arizona Jury Hands Second Nativist Murderer a Death Sentence

Posted in Anti-Immigrant, Extremist Crime by Ryan Lenz on April 7, 2011

An Arizona jury has handed down a second death sentence in the murder of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter, who were targeted by border vigilantes two years ago as part of a plot to steal money and fund an increasingly militant operation against immigrants along the border.

Jason Bush was sentenced to death Wednesday, a month after being convicted of murdering Raul Junior Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia Flores. Bush, known as “Gunny,” was part of Minutemen American Defense, founded by Shawna Forde.

Led by Forde, Bush and another man, Albert Gaxiola, went into the Flores home in Arivaca, about 50 miles southwest of Tucson, believing that Flores was a drug dealer and would have plenty of cash on hand. Prosecutors charged that Bush was the gunman who shot Flores dead before shooting his wife in the leg. He then walked over to Brisenia, who was sleeping with her puppy on the couch, and shot her twice in the head at close range.

The grisly murders exposed the nastier underbelly of the nativist movement on the border.

Bush has ties to several white supremacist groups, and Forde routinely hobnobbed with many of the movement’s more radical leaders. For example, J.T. Ready, the neo-Nazi founder of numerous border vigilante groups, defended Forde after her murder arrest in 2009 by writing, “I would like to personally thank Shawna Forde for doing the job the U.S. government won’t do itself. … Instead of getting locks and cold steel bars, Shawna should be presented the key to the city where she took out the trash.”

Forde was convicted on Feb. 14 of two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder for the May 30, 2009, killings. She also was convicted of two counts of aggravated assault and one count each of aggravated robbery, armed robbery and burglary. A jury gave her the death sentence on Feb. 22.

Gaxiola will be tried in June. Prosecutors have said they again plan to seek the death penalty.

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/04/0 ... r=HW040711

 

Death-row inmate receives additional time for other charges
Forde gets additional 65 years

Kim Smith Arizona Daily Star Arizona Daily Star | Posted: Tuesday, April 26, 2011 12:00 am

Death-row inmate Shawna Forde was sentenced to an additional 65 years Monday in the May 2009 deaths of a 9-year-old Arivaca girl and the girl's father.

Forde declined to make a statement prior to Judge John Leonardo's imposition of the sentences in Pima County Superior Court.

Forde, 43, was convicted in February of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to die for orchestrating the deaths of Raul Junior Flores, 29, and Brisenia Flores.

She was also convicted of the attempted first-degree murder of Flores' wife, Gina Gonzalez, and five burglary, aggravated-assault and armed-robbery counts. Leonardo imposed 10 or 15 years on each of those counts and ran all but one of them consecutive to each other and consecutive to the death sentences.

The Floreses died May 30, 2009, after Flores let a couple pretending to be law enforcement officers into his home in Arivaca. Gonzalez testified she and Flores, her husband of 13 years, were shot after he expressed doubts about their identity.

The gunman assured Brisenia he wasn't going to shoot her, but then shot her twice while she pleaded for her life, Gonzalez testified.

Jurors were told Forde needed money for her border-protection group, Minutemen American Defense, and recruited some men to rob drug smugglers near the border. All the invaders got was a handful of inexpensive jewelry that was later found in Forde's possession, prosecutors said.

Jason Bush was convicted earlier this month of being the gunman and was also sentenced to death. He will be sentenced on burglary, assault and robbery charges May 13.

Jury selection for the last person charged in connection with the case, Albert Gaxiola, will begin June 1.

He, too, is facing the death penalty.

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/crime/a ... 2f452.html