Texas After Violence Project Interview with Ms. Ileana López

COPYRIGHT 2008 ILIANA MARIE LOPEZ AND TEXAS AFTER VIOLENCE PROJECT

Date: June 25, 2008

Place: Home of Iliana Marie López , Austin, Travis County

Interviewer: Virginia Raymond

Videographer: Gabriel Solis

Transcription: Megan Eatman

Reviewed: Virginia Raymond

ILEANA LOPEZ: It's I-L-I-A-N-A—

RAYMOND: Great.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Lopez, L-O-P-E-Z.

RAYMOND: Okay good, and we are at [omitted street address] in Austin, Texas, and my name is Virginia Raymond. The photographer behind the camera is Gabriel Daniel Solis, and we're here with Iliana Lopez to conduct an interview. We talked a little bit before. Do you understand that this project is to have interviews about your experience with capital crimes and with the death penalty and the conviction process?

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes.

RAYMOND: And the whole capital punishment process? Okay. And you understand that we're going to ask you to review the tape afterwards and donate it to us, and if you do, and you approve it and agree then we would donate it for a public archive?

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes, I understand.

RAYMOND: Okay. And also, I just want to make sure you know that you can stop this interview at any time. If I ask you something you don't want to answer, you don't answer it. Anything you want, just, you're in charge. And the tape is about fifty minutes—

GABRIEL SOLIS: About an hour.

RAYMOND: About an hour, so if we talk that long, we will stop for sure then and either, depending on what's going on either change tapes or say thank you, so. So I'm asking you to sign the consent form that you understand the risks and what was going on.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Here you go.

RAYMOND: Thank you so much.

ILEANA LOPEZ: And my middle name is also Marie.

RAYMOND: Marie, okay. Iliana Marie Lopez. I said where we are but I didn't say this is your house,
so, this is your house.

ILEANA LOPEZ: My house.

RAYMOND: Okay, thank you very much. So, why don't we begin with you just telling us a little about yourself, where you were born, how old you are. . .

ILEANA LOPEZ: Okay, I'm Iliana. I was born in San Antonio, Texas, in September of 1981. I'm twenty-six, I'm going to be twenty-seven. I have a degree in psychology and I have a second degree in anthropology, and I have a background in guidance counseling through a graduate program that I was involved in for guidance counseling. I moved to Austin to come to UT to finish my second degree. More about myself?

RAYMOND: Anything about growing up in San Antonio, where you grew up. . .

ILEANA LOPEZ: I grew up in the suburbs of San Antonio. There wasn't a lot of crime, however my parents had a tamale factory in the inner city, so there was always an element of crime there. I grew up both really understanding how to live in both environments. So you had, you know, the poverty stricken, Mexican Americans in the day at work and at night I would go, or when I would go home to the suburbs it was very middle class, white suburbia. And I noticed the difference in the two very early on. I've always stayed very close to urban life and inner cities, because I prefer that to just kind of the mundane-ity of suburbia.

Let's see, I worked with my parents since I was probably seven or eight, so I learned how to, I don't know, make tamales, and sell them, and market them. Yes.

Let's see. I've also lived in Portland. That was about three years ago, and that was a completely different experience as well from San Antonio in that there were very little Hispanic people there. More so Mexican immigrants, so I didn't have a lot of people to identify with or relate to, but I still felt like that was where I would choose to live if I could. I don't know why ethnicity is always such a big factor. Let's see, San Antonio. I went to an all-girls' high school that was Catholic, and I was a national Hispanic scholar, and they made me wear a wig because I was of a rebellious suit, but I didn't mind.

[. . . long section of interview omitted here. . . ]

RAYMOND: You called us probably because Dr. Speed told you about our program yesterday and you had two things that you wanted with us about specifically.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes.

RAYMOND: One was a tragedy, a friend of yours, is that. . .

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes.

RAYMOND: Can you tell us about that?

ILEANA LOPEZ: Okay. When I was fifteen, fifteen or sixteen. It was in 1996. Okay, let's see, one of my best friends, he was my best male friend, was murdered and we had to pick his murderer out of a line-up and also testify against him and I spent time with him, with the murderer, speaking to him prior to the murder, and I never had a chance to tell anybody about what we talked about, and how it made me feel. It was. . .

Okay, so we met him at the mall. That was how it happened. It's just a mall in San Antonio, North Star Mall. It's kind of an upscale mall. All the nationals go to it during tax-free week. And I notice this guy, kind of off to himself. He was a loner, in all black, and he had long black hair, and we invited him over because we kind of felt like we were the outsider group anyway and we were kind of, "Oh, come join us because we're a group of outsiders and you seem like an outsider too."

And we just spent the day talking. However, I was the one that was talking to him. I was talking to Jason. Nobody spent, nobody really joined our conversation, and what we really talked about was our relationships with our fathers, and how we both grew up in households with alcoholic fathers, and how he didn't really love his father, and how his father was very abusive towards him, and he hated his life.

And he was also talking about people following him and, you know, I was kind of joking around with him, like, "Oh, people are following you," like, I thought he was just, I don't know, playing around or making a joke, but then you know he really did seem like paranoid, like he kept looking over his shoulder.

And then, you know, we didn't really think anything about him other than that he was a little weird, because we all had very like weird goth friends or punk rock friends or skinhead friends and this guy didn't seem any weirder than any of us, basically. Except that he was wearing long sleeves in the summertime, or in a very hot day, it was not summertime, it was leap year. It was February 28th, or 29th, 28th. One of those.

And then at one point we went and we put on masks in the mall. Like there were these little animal masks that we put on. And we all took pictures together, and then he started asking me about me and like, what I liked to do, and where I lived, and personal questions like that. And I kind of started to get uncomfortable and avoid telling him where I lived or anything like that and I was very vague, I was giving him vague, like, "Oh, in the north area," or, "Oh, under a--near a bridge," or "on a street" and he was asking my friends for my phone number and he was telling them that he really liked me, that he wanted to get to know me, and that he wanted to write a song about me and write songs about me, and draw my picture because he kept telling me that I was beautiful and I didn't think he was cute. I wasn't attracted to him at all. And also he was older, and I felt that was really creepy.

So I told my friends, "Please do not give him any information about me," and he kept inviting us to his house, like,

"Oh, let's smoke peyote, I have peyote on my property, I know where to find it, I know where to go," because he knew that we smoked pot but we'd never done peyote and that didn't seem like anything that I even wanted to do.

So we were at the Luby's in North Star Mall, and I realize like, "Hey, we have to go," because my parents were going to come pick me and my best friend up, who was dating, she was the girlfriend of Brandon. Brandon was, that's a very, that's a noise in my house.

RAYMOND: Oh no, I'm just, like, I'm just trying to figure out who is who at this point.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Okay. So Brandon died, and Jason killed him, and Omega is my best friend, and that's Brandon's girlfriend.

RAYMOND: Okay.

ILEANA LOPEZ: And Brandon and Omega are kind of giggling and making jokes about, "Oh, Jason likes you."

RAYMOND: How many--you--let me just, I'm just going to interrupt for a secon--

ILEANA LOPEZ: Sure.

RAYMOND: --just because how many of you are in the mall right now?

ILEANA LOPEZ: There were four of us, plus Jason, so five of us.

RAYMOND: So. . .

ILEANA LOPEZ: Omega, Brandon, myself, this guy Robbie was there also, and at one point it was another girl, Samira, I think was her name, or Sahira, another girl was there, but she was there briefly, and so he convinced Brandon to go with him to his house. Okay.

So then, Brandon hugged me goodbye in front of the mall, and he hugged Omega goodbye, and we're like, "What are you going to do?" and he said he was going to go to that guy's house, and we're like, "Dude, don't go there, that's such a bad idea," and he's like, "No, we're just going to get high," and he had already done some drugs that he had stolen from the Walgreen’s pharmacy at the mall.

It was a heart medication that I didn't know why kids were doing the heart, it's called Coricidin, and I didn't know why they were doing it, it was a really big drug thing at Churchill High School in San Antonio where they were taking it to, I don't know if it was an upper or a downer or something you know and it was, lots of kids were doing it, you know and it was like there had just been a kid who had O.D.'d on it at school and another kid had had a mini-stroke, you know all these crazy things were happening with this drug and then Brandon took it that day and we're like, "No, no."

You know, he was like, he was a little, his eyes did look a little dilated and he did seem a little off. We knew that he was on drugs and you know, we're like, "Did you take the drugs?" and yes, he did.

Okay, so then after we left, apparently he had gone to smoke pot with that guy in his car. Well then I find out because he calls me later on at night about 11 o'clock that after they had smoked pot that guy was like, "Eh, let's just go to my house," and Brandon was like, "Okay, let's go," and so they go and I'm like, "What are you guys doing," and he's like, "We're just hanging around, we're just doing stuff," and it sounded very mischievous, like there was something going on, some like drugs, not anything sexual, and they were doing d rugs, and I was like, "Man, I know you're going to do drugs, just be really careful, because I know, you Churchill kids, you can't handle your drugs."

Like I'd already seen all these kids go through all these, I don't know, going to Laurel Ridge and all those places where kids with problems go and I didn't want to see him end up like that, and so. So he was with this strange guy and I'm like, "Just be careful, give me a call later."

He's like, "Yeah yeah yeah, I'll call later."

Well, before we hung up, he's like, "Well, I need my parents to think I’m at your house," and I'm like, "Okay, I'll go ahead and call them on my phone on three-way so it will come up on their caller I.D. as coming up on my phone so they'll think you're at my house." It was his plan but I went along with it. So I heard him talking to his dad and telling him, "I'm at this Taco Stand, the Pink Sombrero, and I'm going to be here with my friends, and don't worry about me I'll be home later."

And his dad was like, "Okay, just be good." And that was like 11 o'clock. My parents would have never let me out past, like, dawn--no, not dawn, that doesn't make sense. Dusk. Yeah.

And so he hung up and then I was like, I knew it was wrong, I knew it was wrong to trick his dad like that, but I would have expected the same from him, so I was like, "Dude, just be careful, okay," and then I hung up with him, and that was the last time I ever talked to him. And then we didn't hear about it, we didn't hear anything from him for like three days, and we were all so, we were worried.

Like, Omega, his girlfriend, was paging him. He was my best friend and we had this thing where we would spend the whole night talking on the phone until four in the morning until one of us went to sleep. And then he would say, "Hey, I fell asleep on the phone, okay, I'm gonna get off." You know, the falling asleep on the phone type of best friend. And then he didn't call me, and I was like, "Where is he?" and finally we started to, like nobody really wanted to think about it, and then we paged him and kept paging him and nobody would call us back, and so then we saw a news clipping that said that an unidentified male body had been found and my mom was the one that said, "I bet that's your friend, I know that's your friend."

And we knew that it was him, and we were like, we didn't know how to react to that, to seeing that, we knew that that was his body. And we were like, "Well, they're going to figure it out." And then we just waited for somebody to contact us. And somebody did. It was the Texas Rangers, and they wanted to know who we had talked to, because we were the last people with Brandon, and we had, I had just picked Jason's face out of pictures. I didn't have to go to a line-up, like, with people, it was just a bunch of pictures in a book. And we picked him out, or I picked him out, and my parents were there and they were kind of giving their two cents, like, "We want our lawyer, we can't have this," you know, and I kind of wanted them to go away and not make it an issue about them.

And then they found out what I had done with his parents and they were just, they blamed me for it. They were like, "How could you do that to his parents? Don't you know that you're the reason?" and I'm like, "Ahhhh, don't say that." I couldn't process that. It was just like, like whatever, blame me, like I already blamed myself of course.

Not to mention I started seeing Jason, like, just in crowds, like I would see him, see his face. It's like other people, now I think I saw him. I still do sometimes, if I see a long-haired guy with glasses, it's like ugh, that looks just like him. He had a mesh, a black mesh shirt. Some things you just immediately remember, like what exactly he looked like or what he was wearing.

But that wasn't, I don't know, it wasn't the same person that I talked to at the mall. Like, it wasn't like a demon like that. Like he was a real human person th at was talking about his alcoholic father and how shitty his life was and how he really did feel like people were out to get him. And I knew he was trying to get us to go with him, you know, but I didn't think he was going to try to hurt us. And it really scared me to think I was that close to being anywhere near him alone. He could have done something to me or Omega. And I didn't cry when his name was--

The Texas Ranger who told us, he came into Omega's house. We all had to go to Omega's house at like nine o'clock at night and my parents were really mad because they had to get out of their bed or something, I don't know, and get into the car and drive at nine o'clock at night on a school night, and I'm like, 'This is not just anything, this is--my best friend's dead." But they were just, "This is such an inconvenience, this is burdensome." It was very dehumanizing to hear them talk about Brandon like that. And then the Texas Ranger walked in and I remember he took off his ha t and he said, "Brandon's dead," and Omega cried, but I didn't cry. But I cried at the rosary. Everybody cried at the rosary. And I apologized to his parents at the rosary, and then at the funeral, and his sister, because he had a little sister.

And it took a long time to really be okay with it. Like, I went to therapy for a while, but I just wanted to talk about my boyfriends because I was a teenager and I didn't really know what the underlying problem was, and I knew like, it's wrong that my best friend was murdered, and I feel really sad about it, but how, what implications does that hold in my life, or how can I ever get over it by just talking about it? Like I didn't think that way was going to help.

And then one time in two-thousand and four or five, I went to his grave for the first time by myself, and I had a really long talk with him. And it was after the trial, the trial was in 1999. That was the year I went to U.T.

And I remember I was subpoenaed at my dorm and they were like, "Uh, you have to testify," and so I had to go and I had to see him and you know they grilled me on the stand and it was like, "Why are you trying to make Brandon out to seem like a criminal?"

Like they were trying to make him seem like this drug addict that was, you know, along for the ride and it was consensual sex and you know, that they tried to bring up the fact that they had this girlfriend and him and they were into cutting, but it wasn't even his girlfriend, it was his ex-girlfriend and she was into it, and it was another one of those weird Churchill groups, you know, and they didn't, yeah.

The prosecution, or the defense team, excuse me, was just really upsetting me. They were bringing up lies about him, like, misconstruing the truth about him a lot. And that was it. And I remember I had a tattoo, my first tattoo, and they were like, "Are you in a gang?" because it's a black widow tattoo, and, "Are you affiliated with this?" and I was like, "How can you. . ." I don't know. It was very disrespectful I think. But since then I know that Jason's appealed. I've never talked to him, I've never spoken about him to anyone.

Omega, I see her once in a while, whenever I go to San Antonio, and we, that will always bond us. Like, that was an experience that, like we just whenever we see each other that's the first thing that we both know that we're thinking about, so we just hug, and then talk about whatever else. Like, we don't have to say it, the hug already said it.

RAYMOND: Would you like to take a break right now?

ILEANA LOPEZ: No, I'm good.

RAYMOND: Okay. I'm looking in my, I'm trying to find a tissue in my--

ILEANA LOPEZ: I'm good.

RAYMOND: Jason was murdered--

ILEANA LOPEZ: Brandon.

RAYMOND: Oh, I'm so sorry. Brandon was murdered in what year?

ILEANA LOPEZ: I want to say 1996.

RAYMOND: 96. And so it was several years before the trial happened--

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes.

RAYMOND: And you were called.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes. It was almost 5--or four, four years after it that it took so long to finally come to trial. Somebody told me that they were in their county and they saw Jason. This guy who, he was always going to jail for whatever offense, and that he was in the general population and not, I don't know how he even knew who he was. It's a very small group in San Antonio, like, everybody knows everybody. I can't stress that enough. In 1999, everybody knew everybody. You know, now there's so many kids that that's not the same I don't think, but back then it was really was. Like all of the groups from the different high schools really knew each other, for sure, and so, you know, when this guy told me, "Yeah I saw that guy Jason that killed your friend," but he didn't, you know, that was it, it was just, "I saw him," like, I don't know. He just wanted to let me know that he had seen him I guess, just to let me know that he had seen him. When I saw him it was. . . He looked exactly the same. Nothing had ever changed. And he looked sad at the trial. And they were like, "Will you point out the person that is the murderer?" and when I couldn't, pointed to him. I didn't want him to see me, that I was scared. That was the biggest thing for me. Like I walked in there like, "Nobody can touch me." And I made sure to really lock eyes with him, you know. Not in a, I never wanted anything bad to happen to Jason, I just want to know why. And if not why, because there is probably is no why, because I don't think he even knows why, I don't think Jason knows why. It's a very unresolvable issue, that in no way can be meted out with another death. Because he was up for the death penalty, and I was strong. Did I tell you I was also in Amnesty International in high school?

RAYMOND: No.

ILEANA LOPEZ: I was the vice president of my chapter. I was, that was, when Brandon died, I was in Amnesty, and that really shaped how I felt about Jason at the trial.

RAYMOND: Tell us about that.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Knowing the cost and the length of time of appeals, and then also the psychological stress of being in there, and I knew that going into the trial, and that's what he was faced with. And I never wanted him to, I wasn't for him to die, and I'm not for anybody to die. I'm against the death penalty. And people ask me, "Well what would you do if it happened to your friend, or your mom," or you know, and I'm like, "It happened to my friend," and I still said no. Like, I've been there, and I still feel like there's more to it than just that, than just retribution at a physical level. There's a lot to learn about people like Jason, very much so.

RAYMOND: When you said there's more to it than retribution, can you tell me what you mean by that?

ILEANA LOPEZ: Definitely. There's more to the criminal process than just your, you know, the punishment should fit the crime. That is such an arcane idiom, euphemism, you know. That's, because there's, there are things linked to the crime, the contexts of the crime. Like, I know in Jason's case they tried to make it seem like there was some drug stuff going on, you know, like that it was an accident, but I didn't, like, on the basis of those appeals and his defense, that wasn't why I was against the death penalty. I still want him to spend his life in prison. I still want him to think about how he's affected the Shank family, particularly his sister, his little sister, but I felt it was very selfish for me or for Omega or for anybody else that was there to feel that he should die. I don't know why, like I really feel like it's not our place to really. . . Maybe there is a difference in the family, being a family member with somebody that has died, but Brandon felt like my family, but I don't think I'll be affected as much as his little sister. There's just a lot of different levels of. . . There's a lot of different levels. You know, Brandon's relationship with Omega, you know, Brandon was a pianist. I don't know, that doesn't have anything to do with it. But one time he came out and he did a concert piece at North Star Mall. They used to have a grand piano in the food court and they let him play it. He was trained in classical piano. And I'll really miss that. I really think Jason would do it again, like, given the chance, he would definitely prey on somebody.

RAYMOND: Are we? Okay, we're going to stop now and change tapes.

RAYMOND: So we're back with this tape two. It's hot, we're not playing the fan, we're not having the fan on because of the sound. So thank you for putting up with this. Could you tell us a little bit about how you met Brandon and Omega, because we just started at the mall and you know he was important to you?

ILEANA LOPEZ: Okay. Omega came to Incarnate Word my sophomore year from Churchill High School. I think it was because her parents were worried about the crowd that she was getting involved in. It's a school in north central San Antonio, it's middle class but there 's a lot crime and maybe even a little bit of poverty in the area, you know, because you have some element of like single family, lower-middle class also. For the most part Churchill, yeah. Middle class.

So Omega, she came to Incarnate Word and we became best friends. And it was through her old crowd at Churchill that I met Brandon, and the only time that I ever got to go out, you know, outside of school and the club, or, the clubs being Amnesty and Journalism club, school clubs, extracurricular activities was the mall. That was the only other place I was allowed to go and that was on the weekends, and very rarely after school, and if it was after school it was in my uniform, so it was. And at that time you could smoke in the mall, in the food court, and then I think the next year they got rid of that and you had to smoke outside.

But I know that we used to go to the mall and smoke pot and we would hide up in the parking lot structure, the garage, and one time Brandon and Omega and I were all at the very top level and we had a joint and we were about to spark it, and all of the sudden a guard came up and said, "Hey, what are you kids doing?" and we're like, "Nothing," and we both--or all three of us, Omega and I were both, you know, we couldn't talk, but Brandon was like, "Nothing's going on, we're just hanging out, we're talking. We didn't want to be in the mall, it's too crowded, too busy," I don't know, he made something up.

And they guy's like, "Well let me see your hands" and he opened his hands and he didn't have anything in them, and we were like, "Oh, wow, what did he do with it," and it was a magic trick, and it was his little sleight of hand that he had done, and he had quickly hidden the joint and he saved us all from getting in trouble. That's how we became really good friends with him.

Like, why did he become. . . I don't remember how specifically--oh, I remember, he was trying to date Omega and so he was like, "Hey, I'll be your best friend, so no more about her," it was kind of like that, but I was like, "I'll hook you up with my best friend." And in that process we became very good friends. And we would spend hours talking about how to get him together with Omega, that was most of our talking, and also just, you know, I don't know, teenage stuff, what we were going to do on the weekend.

And then at the time of his murder, Omega had told her parents that he was my boyfriend, so there was some confusion there, because her parents didn't want her dating anybody. They were very strict also. That was strange. I was like, "Brandon wasn't my boyfriend. He was Omega's boyfriend. He was my best friend." And he always wore a beret. He had a black beret that he always wore and it was Nike and I've never seen anybody wear that anymore. That was a very nineties thing.

RAYMOND: So, you had been friends with Brandon for some time before his tragedy.

ILEANA LOPEZ: I would say we were friends for maybe a few months. Like, best friendships develop quickly. I would say we were friends for at most like five months prior to that.

RAYMOND: And Brandon was at Church--

ILEANA LOPEZ: At Churchill, yes. He went to public school.

RAYMOND: I was very struck by how you said earlier that everybody knows each other in San Antonio.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes. And in Austin. All the people that grew up going to the same shows between San Antonio and Austin, because they had to pick between one city. We would all go there, they would all go there. And so it's like kids from the mid-ninties to late nineties even in Austin we knew each other. In San Antonio, it's--everybody knows everybody in this little corridor of 35, but in San Antonio especially in the high schools you had, you know, your different crowds and there might have been one crowd with different members from different high schools and then another crowd with you know the same, different members of different high schools, but then there were, you know, high school specific crowds. Like the high schools in the northeast side, they were, you know, I don't know, they didn't hang out at North Star Mall, they hung out at the northeast side neighborhoods and the pool halls there. And then all the kids who went to Churchill hung out at, oh, Diamond J's, it was a pool hall. I for got, that's where I would go like everyday. Not the mall, beside the mall. It was the billiards hall. The mall and the pool hall.

RAYMOND: You mean after school or you mean on the weekends?

ILEANA LOPEZ: Both.

RAYMOND: Incarnate Word High School is by the university, right? By Brackenridge?

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes, it's right across the street from the university, or across the highway.

RAYMOND: Okay, and so it was, did you, how did you get home? How did you get to and from school?

ILEANA LOPEZ: I drove.

RAYMOND: Oh you drove?

ILEANA LOPEZ: And before I drove, my mother drove me from the suburbs. So it was easily a 45 minute drive to school, from school, for four years. It was absolutely hell to have to drive that long everyday. And so when I started working, actually I got a job at Whataburger with Omega right off of 281, like, maybe ten minutes away from Incarnate Word, but so far away from my house. And people would always ask me, "Why do you work there," you know, "Why don't you work close to your house?" I don't know, this is close to where I hang out. Like, my school's there, all of my friends live in this area. And then my house was, it was the odd house out that was very far away.

RAYMOND: So north on 281, north of Incarnate Word--

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes.

RAYMOND: --and Breckenridge but south of--

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes. And north--or east, excuse me, my parents lived northwest.

RAYMOND: I see, okay.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yeah.

RAYMOND: So east, okay. Well you've talked about how kids at Winston Churchill and some of them from Incarnate Word knew each other. How did that affect this group of kids when Brandon died?

ILEANA LOPEZ: When Brandon died everybody became his best friend, and that really pissed me off. All of the sudden you had, he had five girlfriends. People came out of the woodwork to say how--and I thought that was really nice though, to say how he touched them, but then you had people that were coming out and saying like how he was, he was a drug addict, or, you know, this was bad about him, and then that was like the drama aspect. Drama, drama big time at Churchill. The kids with their Coricidin heart pills, the heart medication. Right after he died, again there was another kid or maybe there some more kids had overdoses, you know, and it was kind of like, it was taking attention away from that and placing it on drug use. Like, "Oh, Brandon wants to do drugs," and, "Oh my God, everybody's dying."

And I'm like, "Will you stop running around like, you know, headless chickens," you know, and kind of see that Brandon's dead and it wasn't drugs and it wasn't anything it was, he was murdered, and let's just respect the time, respect time for him, because people immediately wanted to start talking about their own problems or problems at Churchill that kids were having, and I didn't go to Churchill, so I didn't know half the people at his funeral, seventy-five per cent of the people, and yet I was one of his best friends. And it really showed me that nobody really knew him, like, including me, I didn't know him either.

RAYMOND: Well, I'm sorry, did we finish, or--

ILEANA LOPEZ: I was going to say when, on his, on the brochure for his rosary, they wrote that his favorite Beatles song was "Imagine," but I knew that wasn't his favorite Beatles song. It was something else. Now I can't remember.

RAYMOND: Yeah, you can't remember.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yeah. And I was like, "No, that wasn't it, he told me it was this-and-this." And so it just, another point that nobody--his parents didn't know him, nobody knew him.

RAYMOND: I wonder if I could take you back, go back to you were talking about in 1999, I guess, was that the fall that you came to U.T.?

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yes.

RAYMOND: You start here as a freshman, and then you get this subpoena. Can you tell us a little bit about that and, yeah, and the trial and what it was like for you, how it logistically all worked?

ILEANA LOPEZ: Okay. I was in the middle of my fall semester and I had somebody come to my door and just hand me the envelope and just looking at it and knowing that it was for the trial, like, added about a ton of pressure to me and I didn't go to school that entire week, maybe even the week after that. It was just, you know, another added piece of the pie to neglect it, you know, another piece, another reason that I didn't have, I didn't want to be there, you know. I felt so uncomfortable and so alone and far away from my comfort zone, and then to know that I was going to have to face Jason again, I wasn't looking forward to it, and it really. . .

I don't even remember sleeping up until the trial, like it just, it was always on my mind, like what was I going to say, what was going to happen. I had been prepped for it, to give a deposition, I guess. I had given a deposition way before, the original one, but then I was also prepped right before I was going to stand and going through tho se questions, and they were kind of like, "Oh, by the way, be aware that the defense people are going to cross-examine you and make you look bad."

And I was like, "Why?," you know, I had no idea about the trial process. And so I get out there and I know that his aunt was testifying. There was other people testifying before me, and I didn't want my mother in the courtroom. I asked her to stay out. And I just, I testified as honestly as I could. When I felt like they were, I don't know, I felt like they weren't doing enough for Brandon. They weren't asking, the prosecution wasn't asking the right questions.

RAYMOND: What would you have said in that trial if you could have? What would have been the right questions, and what would you have wanted to say at that point?

ILEANA LOPEZ: That Brandon was not attracted to Jason, that it was no way consensual because he had a girlfriend and her name is Omega. That much I know. Like, I didn't get a chance to say that because they kept bringing up that he was bisexual and that he had, you know, tried to hit on some guy at his school, and then that he was experimenting sexually with his ex-girlfriend, and I wanted to say, like, "That girl is so messed up," like, she, you know, she's the one that got him into that. I don't know, it doesn't mean that he was looking for that or he wasn't--I don't know, it just, you can't paint somebody's personality by just the associations they keep. No, you can't. So she was, it was that girl, and then it was. . .

There was another thing that they told me that he had had something done to him, like, it was so violent what Jason had done to him that there is no way that it could have been consensual or could have been a non-aggressive act, and that image stands out in my mind even though I never saw it, but the fact that the assistant D.A. told me that he had a footprint on his chest. They discovered him with a sock on his body.

RAYMOND: Is there anything that you would like people to know about your experience with being a friend of someone who's murdered, about being deposed, about going through the trial? If someone was to read this or see your tape later, what -- talk to those people. What do you want them to know or to take from this experience, set of experiences you've had?

ILEANA LOPEZ: How survivor guilt never goes away. It kind of diminishes a little bit. It completely restructures your views on your own life, how happy you are to be alive, and I know how trite that sounds, but it's very true, and you start really. . . Every time I stop to think about that, it makes me want to call my mom because it's who I would miss the most, I guess.

And also I wonder, like, if it were me in his place, how would, seeing how I'm affected and how his family's affected, it also, it's a very big deterrent against suicide. I've seen how just having somebody taken away from you and that it's still surreal ten years later. Like, I can't believe that I will never talk to this person again. That one minute he was okay, and then from one second you can't talk to him anymore. And you have dreams about the person where you can talk to them and that helps. Yeah, but just understanding that you will never physically communicate with someone again. That's very hard. That's the hardest part for me. So yeah. Not being able to talk to him anymore.

RAYMOND: You did say, and not to say that's not true, of course, it is, but you did try to have a kind of conversation, you went to his gravesite.

ILEANA LOPEZ: Yeah, and it really helped. It was like I told him about the trial. I told him about how much I missed him, about how much everybody really missed him. Like, somebody gave me something to give to him to put on his coffin, and I didn't get a chance to, I forgot to take it with me that day, and I remember burning it, like, it will burn and its energy will go to heaven, wherever heaven is, and wherever Brandon is. But yeah, he's at Fort Sam Houston, and the whole process of looking up his name and finding the grave and then just like all of the sudden that was the only grave I could see, and they all look the same. But also I put like a rock on it, because my uncle taught me that when I was a kid.

RAYMOND: Your uncle is from--is that your mom's--

ILEANA LOPEZ: My mom's side. Yeah they all fit little stones. They have a family plot in Laredo, so we always have these little rocks, all of them at the grave sites. It didn't do anything also to help my fear of death. It really just, it put death right there in front of me, especially knowing that it could have been me. It could have been me, and anybody could be Jason, and anybody can say, "Hey, let's go smoke peyote at my house," or, it doesn't even have to be peyote, you know, you're just never aware of people's true intentions are. You can never trust anybody.

RAYMOND: That's a large statement.

ILEANA LOPEZ: I know. I do not trust, I cannot trust anybody anymore.

RAYMOND: Anything else that you want to add?

ILEANA LOPEZ: No.

RAYMOND: Okay, thank you.

[Material reserved -- vr]

COPYRIGHT 2008 Ileana Marie López and the Texas After Violence Project