The Killers of Teresa Macias

by Tanya Brannan

Early on a drizzly April morning in 1996, MariaTeresa Macias, 36-year old mother of three, arrived with her mother at their housecleaning job in the affluent Northern California town of Sonoma. As Teresa parked the car, the pair began gathering up their cleaning supplies for the day's work.

But unknown to them, Avelino Macias, Teresa's estranged husband, was lying in wait. As Teresa opened her door, an angry, menacing Avelino approached the driver's side window.

"Tu sabes que hacer," Teresa said to her mother, Sara Hernandez -- "You know what to do." As the two women had discussed many times during the months of Avelino's violence, obsessive stalking and threats to kill, Sara went into the house to call 911. In the hope of drawing Avelino away from her mother, Teresa fled to the sidewalk with Avelino close behind.

"I dialed 911 but no one answered," Sara said just days later from her hospital bed. "And then I heard the shot." Sara ran to the front door only to see her daughter's crumpled body lying on the sidewalk. "Avelino was running toward the house shooting wildly," Sara remembers. She reached the door and locked it, saving her own life by only seconds. Avelino fired two shots through the door, wounding Sara in both legs.

Avelino Macias returned to the sidewalk and threw himself on top of Teresa's fatally wounded body, then shot himself in the head. In his car, homicide investigators found an empty box of bullets and a copy of the domestic violence restraining order barring any contact by Avelino with Teresa and her family.

Four days later the local paper ran a tiny article, buried in the back pages and headlined "Cops wrap up investigation." This was intended to be the last anyone ever heard of Teresa Macias. Instead, Marie De Santis of Women's Justice Center and I, investigator/advocate with the Purple Berets, conducted a month-long investigation into the Macias family's contacts with the Sonoma County Sheriff's Dept. prior to the murder. By this time, both Marie and I had five years experience working with domestic violence victims as they attempted to get their batterers prosecuted by local law enforcement. We'd heard and documented countless women's stories of being ignored by police, threatened with arrest or the loss of their children if they called again, and having their cases unceremoniously dumped by District Attorney Mike Mullins. We suspected that Teresa Macias, even in death, had a similar story to tell.

READ more about Macias' pleas for help

In the end we released a report detailing at least 20 times Sheriff's deputies were contacted to report Avelino's constant stalking, threats to kill, violations of domestic violence restraining orders, and a host of other felony crimes against Teresa and her family -- sometimes multiple reports in a single day. Not only did Teresa repeatedly call 911, she also went into the sheriff's substation with pages of her diary documenting the violations. Friends and employers delivered their own first-hand reports or written statements detailing Avelino's threatening and frankly frightening behavior in their presence.

Yet despite the sheriff's certain awareness that Avelino's obsession had reached potentially lethal proportions, they never arrested him, even though their own domestic violence policy mandated arrest on domestic violence and on violations of domestic violence restraining orders. In fact, only twice in those months did deputies even bother to write reports of the incidents -- also required by department policy and by California law.

LISTEN to 911 tape

Teresa and her young children had moved in with Monica's family in Boyes Hot Springs (the largely Latino "Soweto" to Sonoma's upscale, overwhelmingly White "Johannesburg") after Teresa had kicked Avelino out for the final time in October, 1995. It was Armstrong who had translated a number of times during recent months when deputies responded to Teresa's calls to the sheriff for protection.

According to Monica, every time the deputies came Teresa showed them her restraining order, court documents that prohibited Avelino from contacting or being within 100 yards of Teresa or her mother. Included with the restraining order was Teresa's sworn declaration detailing Avelino's physical and sexual abuse of herself and her kids.

Yet in the weeks after the homicide when asked to explain why Avelino Macias was never arrested, the Sheriff's Dept. repeatedly stated they didn't know there was any violence or that Teresa was afraid.

Unfortunately, the Sonoma County sheriff's department's handling of the Macias domestic violence case is not an aberration. And when you consider that one-half of all calls to police are to report domestic violence, the impact on women of such routine law enforcement failure is devastating.

READ more about police domestic violence

Armstrong says responding deputies most often laid the restraining order aside unread. "They never sat down with her, hardly ever wrote any notes, never asked her about the history of violence and abuse in the relationship," she continued. "A couple of times they said they'd talk to Avelino, but that's all they ever did."

According to Monica and other witnesses, deputies often told Teresa there was nothing they could do, that they couldn't arrest Avelino unless they saw the violation (not true), and even that it was "a Mexican thing -- the husband's always beating up his wife but then they always get back together."

Cabello was rocked by the loss of her friends. "This didn't have to happen," she cried. "Teresa and Avelino didn't have to die. Those children didn't have to be orphans."

Cabello not only had been present a number of times when Teresa called the sheriff, she herself had made numerous reports of Avelino's stalking and escalating threats to kill. She recalls the night not long before the murder that she and Teresa were driving home when they noticed Avelino following them as he had done increasingly in recent weeks. Cabello drove to the sheriff's substation where she and Teresa reported a number of recent encounters with Avelino.

Marty remembers the night in vivid detail. "I was banging on the desk saying he's going to kill her. He's told everybody he's going to kill her and then he's going to kill his mother-in-law. You've got to do something!" she recalls. And the deputy's response? "He said everybody that says that doesn't do it," Cabello recounts. No arrest was made.

Marty detailed incident after incident of Avelino's stalking -- stalking that had increased dramatically in the months leading up to the murder. "Teresa'd go to bingo and Avelino would show up at bingo. She'd go to church and Avelino'd come to the church. He came to her work, to her house -- everywhere she went he'd be there." With no action by the sheriff's department, Avelino felt he had nothing to fear. "If I was doing something wrong they'd arrest me," he bragged.

Marty had also been present twice in years past when sheriff's deputies responded to calls involving Avelino and a gun. In 1990, Avelino shot a man in the head, ostensibly over a drug deal gone bad. He was never arrested or prosecuted in the shooting.

At around the same time, he again pulled a gun, this time threatening to kill Teresa and everyone else in the room. Teresa ran for her life. Again the sheriff was called and again, no arrest. Clearly, the sheriff's department knew not only that Avelino had a gun, but that he would use it.

READ more about Macias' struggle with CPS

But it was Teresa's mother, Sara Hernandez, who witnessed perhaps the final time that police blew the chance to save Teresa's life. Sara and Teresa were driving together to a counseling session in Santa Rosa -- sessions Child Protective Services forced Teresa to attend with Avelino with the state-mandated goal of re-unifying the family. CPS had earlier removed the three Macias children from the home, citing Teresa's inability to protect them from Avelino's abuse. Struggling to comply with CPS's ever-growing and contradictory demands, Teresa found herself fighting yet another unsympathetic bureaucracy.

"Teresa noticed Avelino following us in his car," Sara relates. Shaking in terror, Teresa drove straight to the Santa Rosa Police station where she handed police the restraining order and asked that they arrest Avelino, who had boldly followed her into the station. As police handcuffed Avelino, Teresa called her CPS worker, Suni Levi to tell her what happened and to ask her to help translate with the police. Levi told Teresa to put the officer on the phone.

According to the SRPD officer, Levi then told him to release Avelino because the couple's counseling session was more important. Police removed the handcuffs and Avelino left, a free man. Three weeks later, Teresa Macias was dead.

LISTEN to 911 tape

But nothing remotely resembling an apology was forthcoming. After wrapping up an internal investigation into their contacts with the Macias family (an investigation that lasted exactly one day), Asst. Sheriff Gary Zanolini told Press Democrat reporter Tom Chorneau, "I'm comfortable with how we handled Macias."

Despite witnesses' corroborated accounts of numerous calls to the department, Sheriff Mark Ihde claimed they'd had only two contacts with Teresa. Weeks later they admitted to four, and finally nine contacts -- far short of the more than 20 calls we'd uncovered -- calls that could be documented by at least two sources.

Sara Hernandez, mired in multiple bureaucracies as she sought to bury her daughter, get her grandchildren released from foster care, deal with immigration and a host of other emergencies, began to despair. Shortly before her death Teresa had said to her mother something that she considered a mandate: "If I die," Teresa told her, "I don't want other women to suffer as I have suffered. I want them to be listened to."

But nothing coming out of the Sheriff's Department gave her any hope that would be the case. With all other avenues closed, Sara sought legal counsel in a final effort to see that her daughter's death be used to force police to change. In October 1996, attorney Rick Seltzer of the Oakland law firm Seltzer & Cody, filed the historic federal civil rights lawsuit MariaTeresa Macias v. Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Ihde.

The federal lawsuit asserts that Teresa Macias was discriminated against by the Sheriff's Dept. because she was a woman, because she was a Latina, and because she was a domestic violence victim, all violations of her constitutional right to Equal Protection. Even further, the lawsuit charges that the sheriff's department's failure to make arrests, write reports, conduct investigations, or in any way protect Teresa also emboldened Avelino, thus increasing the danger to Teresa and her family, ultimately resulting in her murder.

In a case that already had set national precedent by even coming before a jury, no one could have anticipated the dramatic and world-changing events that would spill forth in the two-day trial and its aftermath.