‘This guy killed my little sister'

McALLEN — Something about Juan Huerta made the woman uneasy.

“I felt it for a reason,” Maria Elena Lopez said in Spanish. “The more I knew him, the worse I felt.”

Huerta, a security guard who recently admitted to killing his wife and another man, befriended the woman’s teenage daughter more than 10 years ago. The pair went out occasionally, and Lopez suspected that the man was pursuing a romantic relationship with the 18-year-old girl.

One brisk February evening, Huerta picked up Nancy Lopez to take her and a friend out for a drive.

Nearly 13 years later, Lopez still remembers the words she spoke to Huerta as her daughter left the house with him:

“Be careful with her. She’s all I have.”

A state investigator knocked on Lopez’s door later that night and told the woman that her daughter had been killed in a car wreck near Mission.

“(The investigator) asked questions like: ‘Did she live here?’ ‘Was she your daughter?’” Lopez said. “Why was he speaking in the past tense?”

The family would later learn that Huerta failed to yield the right of way at an intersection, causing another driver to barrel into his 1986 Nissan. Six others, including Huerta, were rushed to area hospitals.

THE DOUBLE HOMICIDE

Huerta, a 37-year-old security guard, came home early  Nov. 14 and found his wife Alma and the man with whom she had been having an affair. Huerta told police he pulled out his service weapon and shot his wife and her companion, Juan Jose Gamez.

Then he called 9-1-1 and waited for deputies to arrive.

Huerta’s photograph, displayed by local media following the double-homicide, brought back painful memories to the Lopez family.

“His face came back to me,” Nancy’s older brother Jose said in a telephone interview. “This guy killed my little
sister.”

Huerta was wearing a black security uniform when deputies arrived, according to a statement issued by the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office the day of the slayings. He told investigators he was employed by Magnum Force Security as an armed guard, despite a criminal record that includes a conviction for criminally negligent homicide in Nancy’s death and attempted murder in February 1993.

Huerta declined an interview with The Monitor from his cell at the Hidalgo County Jail Friday afternoon.

Magnum Force Security owner Adrian Garcia said Huerta used an alias that turned up clean after a criminal background check through the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Garcia said he hired Huerta several weeks before the crime because the man claimed to have 11 years of experience, even though Garcia had no proof that claim was true.

“I’m not going to lie — I thought it was weird, awkward,” Garcia said. “But I believed him because he knows more than me (about private security). He knows job sites, companies, owners.”

LINGERING QUESTIONS

Jose Lopez recently recalled the night his younger sister died. Huerta had driven Nancy and another friend to Bentsen State Park to practice firing a handgun, Jose Lopez said. A Border Patrol agent spotted the trio and asked them to leave.

The wreck happened minutes later as Huerta drove away at the intersection of Breyfogle Road and Military Highway, where a memorial stone dedicated to Nancy still remains.

“We’d been wondering what ever happened to that guy,” Jose Lopez said after learning about Huerta’s alleged involvement with the recent double-homicide. “He had a gun. Who knows how he got a gun?”

Officials have yet to answer questions about how he obtained a firearm or became employed as a security guard.

The case has been referred to the Texas Department of Public Safety — the agency oversees private security companies — to decide whether to file any charges against Magnum Force Security.

DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange said last week that Huerta had applied to be a security guard “several years ago,” but his application was rejected. State investigators are examining Huerta’s employer and why the organization hired him despite his ineligibility to work as a security officer. Fingerprints are routinely taken and examined during the DPS background check, making it difficult to provide a fake application.

“Based on his criminal history, he would not have been eligible to be licensed as a security guard,” Mange told The Monitor.

WOUNDS REOPENED

Maria Elena Lopez said the recent deaths of Alma Huerta and Gamez angered her.

“It’s not fair that (Huerta) did the same thing again,” Maria Elena Lopez said. “It’s an injustice.”

The woman said her daughter was trusting, and would often befriend unpopular or shy classmates because “she had pity on them.” Maria Elena Lopez said she often argued with her daughter because the girl also had a tendency to become friends with people that had unsavory reputations. Nancy’s acquaintances tended to separate the girl from her mother, she said.

“My daughter was like (singer) Selena, very trusting,” she said. “But I told her there was a reason others didn’t want to be friends with them.”

Maria Elena Lopez said she went to Alma Huerta’s funeral to extend her sympathy to grieving relatives and to warn them to stay wary of Juan Huerta.

“After all those times I asked him to take care of (Nancy),” the woman said, “that wretch did it again.”

Ana Ley covers law enforcement and general assignments for The Monitor. She can be reached at (956) 683-4428.