The violence was bad enough. But one hopes that it did not stem from political grievances in a foreign country.
According to Houston Public Media, Luis Alfredo Pacheco Rojas, 34, known in music circles as the rapper El Pikante, died following an ambush-style attack at a Houston gas station on Monday night.
Rojas was the son of Alfredo Pacheco, president of the Dominican Republic’s lower house of Congress, known as the Chamber of Deputies.
Houston Police Department Assistant Chief Adrian Rodriguez told reporters that Rojas and three other Hispanic men had entered the gas station’s convenience store.
After the four men returned to their black Cadillac Escalade, two vehicles — a silver, four-door Dodge Charger and a silver, four-door Mercedes Benz — pulled up to the Escalade, Rodriguez said.
At that point, a group of gun-toting Hispanic men, all wearing white T-shirts, got out of the two vehicles and began shooting, he said.
“We do believe that these individuals in the Escalade were targeted,” Rodriguez said.
Rojas fled the vehicle but was found dead in a back room of the convenience store. He had a pistol in his possession, according to police.
A 29-year-old man from the same group was shot and taken to the hospital in critical condition. The other two were not hurt, Houston Public Media reported.
On Tuesday, Houston police released surveillance photos of three suspects in the shooting.
UPDATE: Surveillance photos of 3 suspects wanted in last night’s fatal shooting incident on South Wayside.
More info: https://t.co/UEsuG1PEAT
If you can ID them, please call HPD Homicide 713-308-3600 or anonymous tip @CrimeStopHOU at 713-222-TIPS for reward up to $5K.#hounews https://t.co/1hhU2Dnku9 pic.twitter.com/fEiypDRaU1
— Houston Police (@houstonpolice) April 2, 2024
According to the deceased’s powerful father, Rojas lived in Atlanta with his wife and children, according to KPRC-TV.
“I’m hurt. I lost a son and it’s never easy to lose someone under those circumstances,” Pacheco said.
Rojas, however, had moved to Texas to work as a DJ and pursue a music career, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported.
In other words, many of this story’s relevant details remained unknown on Friday. And that includes the killers’ motives.
The rap industry, of course, has both a recent and a lengthy history of fatal shootings. If evidence exists to support that particular angle of investigation, police have not yet said so.
Should more Americans go armed in public?
Another possible angle — again, without any known evidence to support it — involves Pacheco’s political career.
On that point, at this stage, nothing obvious or specific to Pacheco would explain the murderous motives of Houston thugs.
A brief and general background of Dominican Republic politics, however, might sound familiar to Americans.
A member of the nation’s governing Modern Revolutionary Party, Pacheco has presided over the Chamber of Deputies since 2020, according to Houston Public Media.
In July 2020, Luis Abinader of the ruling party won the Dominican presidential election. Abinader emerged with 53 percent of the votes, according to the BBC.
That election, of course, took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, the BBC story made no mention of mail-in ballots.
The presidential contest also occurred against the backdrop of election integrity-related protests.
According to the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, officials from the Dominican Republic’s Electoral Board had to suspend municipal elections four hours into voting on Feb. 16, 2020, due to electronic voting machine errors. Weeks of protests followed.
The Electoral Board rescheduled the municipal elections for March 15, 2020, using only paper ballots.
Of course, none of this provides an obvious motive for Rojas’ killers. But it does remind us that political strife and suspicions of election-related shenanigans plague not only Americans but people around the globe.
Furthermore, if the apparently targeted attack had any connection to Pacheco’s position in the Chamber of Deputies — and again, we do not know that it did — then it introduced an element of political violence that Americans have hitherto avoided for a long time.
And that would raise additional alarms about President Joe Biden’s open border. After all, armed thugs carrying out political assassinations would be the last thing Americans need to import.
