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EDINBURG — “The officer is down! We need to call 9-1-1! Get me my gun!”
That’s what off-duty Pharr police officer Jacqueline Arrellano yelled as she ran into her sister’s home in a panic just moments after Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Moises Sanchez was shot on April 6, 2019.
Sanchez lay on the ground grievously wounded as the lights from his patrol unit shone inside Doris Valdez’s Edinburg home, where her family had gathered for a boisterous Saturday night get-together, complete with merengue music blaring from outdoor speakers.
When the family noticed the flashing red and blue lights shining through the living room windows, they thought it was because neighbors had reported them to the police for the loud music.
Valdez told her sister, “Jackie,” to go outside and let the officer know they’d turn the music down.
But when Arrellano walked outside, she stumbled onto a scene that would be indelibly seared into her memory.
“She looked panicked,” Valdez said of her sister, who had run back into the house seconds after stepping outside.
“She looked afraid to me,” Valdez said as she testified in the death penalty case against Victor Alejandro Godinez, 28, the Edinburg man charged with capital murder in Sanchez’s death.
Godinez also stands charged with the attempted capital murder of two Edinburg police officers, Jesus Moreno and Detective Sandra Tapia.
Valdez was the first witness called to the stand on Monday morning in what is expected to be a weeks-long trial against Godinez.
Her home on Maltese Street by Freddy Gonzalez Drive lies just a stone’s throw from where prosecutors say Godinez fled the scene of a crash before shooting Sanchez as he responded to the scene.
The jury, consisting of five men and seven women, plus four alternates, would hear not only from Valdez and her sister, Jackie, but from other neighbors in the Falcon’s Landing neighborhood, Hidalgo County Assistant District Attorney Joseph L. Orendain said during the state’s opening statements.
They would hear how the sound of Sanchez gasping for air would haunt Arrellano’s dreams. And they would hear directly how dozens of local, state and federal law enforcement officers responded to the scene.
The jury would also see the wounds wrought by the .357 Magnum bullets that pierced Sanchez’s skull and shoulder.
“You will have to see that … we’re doing that so you can see how brutal the murder was,” Orendain told the jury.
And though Sanchez would remain alive for another four months, the jury would hear testimony from a Houston pathologist who found that his death was the direct result of “that .357 Magnum,” Orendain said.
But before the jury heard all those grisly details, they heard Orendain describe the type of man that Trooper Sanchez had been — a husband and father of three who coached youth sports and regularly attended church.
He was married to his wife for a quarter of a century before his death.
“Just yesterday was their 28th wedding anniversary,” Orendain told the jury.
On April 6, 2019, Sanchez had spent the day shopping with his wife before reporting to work.
Once he was on duty later that evening, he approached the intersection of Freddy Gonzalez and North 10th Street in western Edinburg, where he happened upon the scene of a crash just moments after it had occurred.
Bystanders alerted him to a driver that had walked away from the scene, so Sanchez turned his vehicle in that direction, the prosecutor said.
Sanchez saw a man along Freddy Gonzalez Drive and ordered him to stop, but the man didn’t listen, Orendain said.
“His last words … were, ‘Stop! Don’t do it!’” Orendain said.
Nearby, a woman who had stepped out of her home to take out the trash heard those words and ducked.
Prosecutors allege that at that moment, the man that Sanchez had encountered — Godinez — fired all six rounds of his .357 Magnum revolver at the trooper, hitting him in the head and the shoulder.
Sanchez managed to return fire.
“She hears the firing of that .357 Magnum and the return fire,” Orendain said of Nora Olivarez, who will also testify during the trial.
Godinez, meanwhile, had fled on foot.
At about the same time, Arrellano, the off-duty Pharr cop who had been enjoying family time at her sister’s house, emerged from the home to find Sanchez seriously wounded laying in a pool of his own blood and vomit, Orendain said.
“He couldn’t breathe. He was gasping for air,” the prosecutor said.
That’s when she ran inside for help before running back outside.
Arrellano held her gun at the ready while her sister, Doris Valdez and Valdez’s soon-to-be daughter-in-law administered first aid.
Later, when uniformed police officers arrived on the scene, they took over the ministrations.
“Roberto Reyes takes a compression bandage and puts it on the head to keep what’s left inside,” Orendain said of one Edinburg police officer.
Orendain would go on to describe how Sanchez was transported to the hospital while scores of law enforcement descended on the area, set up a perimeter and began their search for Godinez by both land and air.
The prosecutor ran through an exhaustive list of names, from the bewildered neighbors who found bullet holes and shell casings around their homes, to each of the cops as they closed in on their suspect.
“It’s the largest manhunt Edinburg has ever seen,” Orendain said.
As the prosecutor laid out the grim sequence of events the state believes occurred, Godinez sat emotionless, looking straight ahead. His gaze never turned to the prosecutor, the jury box or the judge.
He wore a crisp white button down shirt under a dark charcoal gray suit jacket, which he had earlier draped over his hands to conceal the shackles that bound his wrists.
After Orendain finished his nearly hour-long remarks, Godinez’s attorney, O. Rene Flores, waived making an opening statement for the defense.
Instead, the state began its case-in-chief against Godinez, beginning with its first witness, Doris Valdez.
But Valdez didn’t make it far into her testimony before state District Judge Letty Lopez asked that the jury be removed from the courtroom pending a debate over a portion of her testimony.
At issue was whether Arrellano’s panicked exclamations as she ran back into the house qualified as hearsay, which would be inadmissible testimony, or whether they were allowable as an “excited utterance” exception.
With the jury out of the room, Lopez probed Valdez over exactly what she had heard, in what order and over what timeframe.
Ultimately, Lopez said she would allow Valdez to testify that she heard her sister, Arrellano, make three consecutive statements asking for a phone to call 9-1-1, that an officer was down, and that she needed her gun.
Following the recess, prosecutors showed the jury three videos taken from Valdez’s home on the night of the shooting.
The first showed a suspect, who prosecutors say is Godinez, running in the front yard and being pursued by Sanchez, who was in his DPS vehicle. The second is a continuation of that sequence that shows Sanchez opening his door before falling to the ground as Godinez flees.
The last video is from a Ring camera on the front door. It doesn’t show anything, but a gunshot can be heard in the video.
Staff Writer Francisco Jimenez contributed to this report.
