Saturday, May 19, 2007

A night of terror for an Adelino family

AWOL soldiers try to rob store on an April evening

Richard Melzer La Historia del Rio Abajo

La Historia del Rio Abajo is a monthly column about Valencia County history written by members of the Valencia County Historical Society.

This month's author is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico-Valencia Campus, the vice president of the Valencia County Historical Society and the current president of the Historical Society of New Mexico.

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The author wishes to thank Frances Torres Perotti, Ramon Torres, Matt Baca and the late Gladio Baca for their kind assistance in the preparation of this article.

Opinions expressed in this and all columns of La Historia del Rio Abajo are the author's alone and not necessarily those of the Valencia County Historical Society or any other group or individual.

Long before "big box" stores or convenience chain stores invaded Valencia County, there were "mom and pop" grocery stores in almost every community of the Rio Abajo.

These small, friendly establishments are remembered fondly for their social as well as their commercial functions. Local residents often met and shared news of the day as they purchased needed food and supplies.

Unfortunately, small grocery stores were also vulnerable targets for thefts and, in some cases, more violent crimes.

Alvarado "A.S." Torres and his wife, Helen, ran one such store on Highway 47 in Adelino. The Torreses' store was actually two operations: a grocery store on the south end of the building and a bar, known as the Diamond T, on the north end.

The bar was called the Diamond T (for Torres) because A.S. was such a dapper dresser, much like the legendary Diamond Jim Brady.

A single gas pump stood out front of the store and bar. The business also served as the local Greyhound bus depot.

The Torres family, including young daughters Bessie, Carmen, Frances and Lorraine, lived in a house attached to the premises to the east.

A.S. Torres had always been an industrious, enterprising man. Born in Tomé in 1911, he had used his bilingual skills to translate court proceedings from a very young age.

Marrying Helen Jaramillo in 1937, Torres had run his Adelino store until 1942 when he moved his family to San Diego, Calif., to work in the war industry. Torres worked at the Consolidated Aircraft Company, helping to build B-24 bombers for the duration of World War II.

After the war, the Torres family returned to Adelino to operate their store and deal with local real estate. Torres was said to be among the largest landowners in Adelino by 1949. His ads for property sales often appeared in the Belen News.

Wednesday, April 6, 1949, was uneventful at the Torres store until about 8 that evening. It was then that a neighbor, 38-year-old Nicanor "Nick" Sanchez, came by to purchase some items. Although the store had already closed, Torres let his friend in, leaving the front door unlocked.

Crime was rare in small communities like Adelino in the late 1940s. But A.S. Torres was usually cautious, especially because his family lived in quarters so close to his two business establishments.

And the world was changing after World War II. You never knew who might be traveling through a small rural community like Adelino with mischief on their minds.

And so Torres kept a loaded .38 caliber Colt 6-shooter on a small table by his kitchen so that he could grab it quickly, if needed. Having served as a deputy sheriff, Torres was an excellent marksman.

Torres' daughter, Frances, remembers her father lecturing his children about the proper use of guns so that they'd never think of them as toys. A dutiful father, Torres would sometimes take his daughters out back to shoot at watermelon targets to demonstrate how terribly destructive guns could be.

The Torres family was eating dinner when A.S. went to serve their after-hours customer, Nick Sanchez. Sanchez's pickup truck was the only vehicle in the parking lot out front. Neither Torres nor Sanchez could have known that a dark sedan with Ohio license plates was headed their way, driving north on Highway 47.

Three young men rode in the sedan. Army soldiers on furloughs, they had spent the afternoon at Carter's Bar on North Second Street in Belen. Fellow patrons recall that the soldiers drank quite a bit before leaving with the bar owner's teenage son, Frankie. They dropped Frankie off at Belen's Teen Town club.

Leaving Belen, the trio crossed the bridge over the Rio Grande and proceeded north through La Constancia and into Adelino. They stopped at the Torres store. Two men got out. The driver stayed behind.

At 8:15 p.m. the two strangers entered the grocery's front door with white handkerchiefs over their faces and with newly purchased coveralls over their Army uniforms. Twenty-two-year-old Thomas Jewels pointed a .32 caliber automatic pistol at Nick Sanchez. Twenty-year-old Timothy Myers rushed around the north end of the counter and aimed a similar weapon at A.S. Torres.

Speaking at the same time, the robbers demanded that Torres and Sanchez, "Put your hands up," to which Torres replied, "What's going on? Are you trying to pull something funny?"

Bravely, Torres and Sanchez began wrestling with the robbers. Shoving Myers aside, Torres rushed into his living quarters, grabbed his Colt 6-shooter and told his family to hide. Myers recovered his balance and fled through the store's front door and into the parking lot.

Circling outside, Torres peered around the northwest corner of his building. Seeing Myers near the store's gas pump, Torres fired a quick shot and stepped back out of sight. Myers returned six rounds, foolishly using the gas pump for cover.

Meanwhile, Sanchez and Jewels continued their struggle inside. Jewels struck Sanchez on the head with his Army pistol and tried to escape through the Torres' kitchen.

By now, Torres had re-entered his house from a back door, just as Jewels entered the kitchen, posing a direct threat to the Torres family's safety.

The storekeeper shot three times from a distance of from 15 to 20 feet. One shot hit Jewels squarely in the heart, killing him instantly. Frances remembers seeing the dead man on the floor, his military uniform clearly showing under his coveralls.

Torres instructed his older daughter, Bessie, to run across the street to tell her uncle, 27-year-old Alfonso Torres, what had happened so that he could relay the news to the sheriff in Belen.

Alfonso jumped into his car and hurried off toward Belen on Highway 47. As he drove, Alfonso noticed a dark 1935 model car with out-of-state license plates. Thinking that the car and its passengers might somehow be involved in the failed robbery, Alfonso memorized the plate: K743-OHIO.

Alfonso Torres brought Sheriff Elfego Baca and Assistant District Attorney George P. Seery back to the scene of the crime. By then, almost everyone in Adelino had gathered at the Torres store. As nearby residents recall, it was not every day that their small community experienced such excitement. The local newspaper would call the event, "a spectacular gun battle" and an "action-packed drama."

A coroner's jury of six men soon gathered and determined that "the cause of death was the result of a gunshot wound fired by Alvarado Torres in defense of his home and family." In other words, the jury confirmed that Torres had shot Thomas Jewels in self-defense.

Hours later, an overturned dark car was found abandoned in a ditch about four miles north of Adelino. If their car had been traveling south when Alfonso Torres had seen it on his way to Belen, the suspects must have veered their get-away vehicle in the opposite direction when they realized they had been spotted.

Footprints from the overturned car indicated that two men had fled the scene in the direction of the Rio Grande.

But where had the two fugitives gone? State and local policemen set up roadblocks throughout the area, but no one was apprehended that night and into the next day. The police were baffled.

Their luck changed on late Thursday afternoon when Bernalillo County sheriffs arrested Timothy Myers and 17-year-old Bobby B. Clark as they walked along East Central Avenue in Albuquerque. The two offered no resistance, partly because Myers suffered a minor chest wound as a result of his shoot-out with A.S. Torres in Adelino.

Treated at the Veterans Hospital in Albuquerque, Myers was soon released and transported to the Bernalillo County jail, where Clark was already in custody. A.S. Torres identified Myers as one of his assailants when the storeowner came to Albuquerque the following day.

The police quickly placed the pieces of the puzzle together. Based on orders found in Thomas Jewels' Army uniform, the police learned that Jewels had been ordered to report from his last base in occupied Japan to his new assignment at Camp Campbell in Kentucky by April 21, 1949.

Somewhere en route to Camp Campbell, Jewels had met up with fellow parachute infantrymen Myers and Clark. Myers came from Fostoria, Ohio, and undoubtedly owned, or had stolen, the get-away car with Ohio state license plates.

Bobby Clark had previously lived in Belen where he'd been involved in petty juvenile offenses, according to police records. He'd left Belen and had joined the Army, but had apparently returned to town with Jewels and Myers.

Familiar with Valencia County, Clark had likely identified the isolated Torres store as an easy mark for a quick robbery. Clark might have assumed that with income from its bar, grocery, gas pump, bus depot, and land sales, the Torres business was likely to have more cash on hand than most small operations.

On April 12, Myers and Clark appeared before Justice of the Peace John Elliott in Los Lunas. Although only a preliminary hearing, the session drew a standing-room-only crowd.

Myers pleaded guilty to attempted robbery. When offered a court-appointed attorney, he replied, "I don't know what for." Clark, on the other hand, pleaded not guilty and claimed that he was only 17, which meant he should be tried as a minor.

Held on bond, Myers and Clark awaited the next district court session. They didn't need to wait long. Within two weeks after the botched crime in Adelino, District Court Judge Edwin L. Swope accepted Myers' guilty plea and ordered him to serve three years in the state penitentiary in Santa Fe.

Unshaven and looking disheveled, Myers appeared relieved that his sentence was so short. Judge Swope stressed the seriousness of the crime, but Myers did not seem to notice or, at this point, care.

Clark still insisted on his innocence, admitting that he had been with Jewels and Myers at Carter's Bar on April 6, but claiming that he had parted company with the pair before they left Belen that evening.

With no witnesses at the crime scene, the state's case against Clark was weak. Clark's case records at the Valencia County Courthouse are now missing, so nothing is known of how his case was finally, if ever, resolved.

Meanwhile, A.S. Torres and his family attempted to get on with their lives the best they could in Adelino. Not long after the foiled robbery, a fire broke out in a back storeroom. Only the quick help of neighbors contained the fire before it destroyed the entire building.

Concerned for their family's safety, A.S. and Helen sold their store in Adelino and moved to Belen in 1951. Another daughter, Mary Ellen, was born to the family, and Torres began a new 23-year career as a technical engineer at Sandia National Labs. A.S. drove a carpool of fellow lab employees for many years.

A.S. and Helen traveled to places across the United States and around the world. Their journeys took them to countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.

In 1976, during the nation's Bicentennial Celebration, Torres played the role of Father Jean B. Ralliere in a grand historical drama performed on the Tomé plaza. As a direct descendent of Spanish settlers who arrived in New Mexico with Don Juan de Oñate in the conquest of 1598 and with Don Diego de Vargas in the reconquest of the 1690s, it was fitting that he played this important role, speaking both in Spanish and in English.

Those of us who knew A.S. Torres respectfully referred to him as "Mr. Torres." Ironically, he entered a third career in his later years: the locksmith trade to help others secure their property against potential theft.

The author spent many interesting hours with this slim, unassuming man. If he ever mentioned the most frightful, dramatic moment of his life, it was only in passing. He much preferred to talk about his life as an interpreter and his pride in New Mexico history and culture.

A.S. Torres died on Aug. 2, 1999. According to his daughter, Frances, he had lived "an interesting, full life, with many adventures." No one could disagree.

Today, hundreds of cars speed by the Torres' old place, now simply a bar, in Adelino. The business has changed hands several times and was once even owned by Nadine Brady, the granddaughter of legendary Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady, who was shot by Billy the Kid in 1878.

Fortunately, Nadine's Fiesta Bar and its successors have not been visited by any outlaws since the failed robbery of 1949. Only a few old-timers still remember it as the scene of one of the most famous, tragic shoot-outs in Rio Abajo history.

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