Sometimes, desperate for money to buy drugs, she would leave her kids with Benavides, catch the El Aguila Rural Transit bus from Rio Bravo to downtown Laredo, and walk up San Bernardo to the prostitute blocks. She later became a mother, and though she doted on her children, she continued to be plagued by addiction into her twenties. She dropped out of high school, became addicted to Xanax and other prescription drugs, and eventually turned to cocaine. But when she was a teenager, she was sexually assaulted by an uncle of one of her friends, and her life began to spiral. Whenever the ice cream truck drove up and down Rio Bravo’s worn streets, she begged her mother for spare change so she could buy ice cream for her friends who had no money.Īccording to Benavides, Ramirez had been a good student. Growing up in Rio Bravo, Ramirez learned to play Mexican folk music on a wheezy accordion, and she memorized the lyrics to Selena’s pop songs, always singing along when they played on the radio. Ramirez was the third of Benavides’s four children “ mi niña hermosa” (“my beautiful girl”), Benavides liked to call her. Benavides, a kind, slightly stooped woman, invited the officers into her trailer, and they informed her that her daughter had been murdered. An American flag was mounted on the front of the mobile home. A small, wobbly trampoline, a pink dollhouse, and other toys were scattered across the yard. Two Texas Rangers and two detectives from the sheriff’s department drove to Rio Bravo, a low-income border community thirteen miles south of Laredo, where Ramirez had lived in a green mobile home with her mother, Maria Cristina Benavides, and two of Ramirez’s children, a daughter and a son, ages seven and three. A computer search showed that she had been arrested for prostitution on San Bernardo in 2008. The woman was transported to the county morgue, where she was identified through her fingerprints as Melissa Ramirez. She hopped in the man’s truck, and they drove away. That night, she wore a light-colored tank top and black shorts. Ramirez had been working San Bernardo for nearly a decade. On September 2, 2018, the day before Labor Day, he arrived at the prostitute blocks in the late evening hours and spotted Melissa Ramirez, a 29-year-old with thick black hair. One of the women would later tell a close family member that he was the most pleasant of all the men she met there. After an hour or so, he would drive her back to San Bernardo, hand her some cash, and wish her, as she stepped out of his white Dodge, a good evening.
Occasionally he would take a woman to his home in a well-kept subdivision in far north Laredo, explaining that his wife and children were out of town. He sometimes asked for oral sex, never intercourse, and every now and then he’d just want to go for a drive and talk. He told some of the women his name was Juan with others, he went by David. Whenever the man would pull up beside one of the women in his pickup, he would give her a smile. On any given night, there were six to ten women working the blocks.
He usually showed up after dark, slowing as he came to the four-block section of San Bernardo a couple of miles north of downtown that many Laredo residents called “the prostitute blocks,” an area dotted with fast-food restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, and low-rent office buildings.
He drove a white 2015 Dodge Ram 2500 pickup that always appeared to be freshly detailed. His black hair was neatly trimmed on top and shaved on the sides, like a military cut, and he had a stubble beard. He was in his mid-thirties, a strapping man, at least six feet tall and two hundred pounds. He first began frequenting San Bernardo Avenue, in the border city of Laredo, in the late spring of 2018.
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