That certain blooping sound from my iPhone woke me up before 6 a.m. the other morning — a text message.
It was a police source with a terse note: “Tru off dwi acc at 90 and mcmullen. Off being booked.” The tip would spawn this story.
“Tru” stands for Tactical Response Unit, a specialized force that Police Chief William McManus created shortly after he took the helm here in 2006. The unit’s mission is to saturate high-crime areas of San Antonio. It has been criticized — both within the Police Department and without — for a certain latitude in tactics and culture.
Now my source was saying a TRU officer, drunk, had crashed a city vehicle.
I rushed to the scene on U.S. 90, but it had cleared. So I drove to the city’s detention center, where authorities typically haul arrested people. But the supposedly arrested cop — Officer Winder Morales — hadn’t been booked yet.
This state of grace — no charge, no bail — persisted for hours. It was perplexing. The accident had occurred at 5 a.m., yet five hours later there was no trace of a drunken cop. Except in cases of serious injury, most suspects are booked immediately following an arrest.
Then another text came through.
“My guys sez cover-up bigtime.”
I was hyped up. I had to get the story. And I did, with the help of a couple of internal memos. Meanwhile, I let the Police Department know I had the story. Later, I heard a plausible account — unproven, yet plausible — that could explain the long delay in the officer’s processing.
According to two sources, Morales told an officer immediately after the crash that he was unhurt. Then he made a phone call and apparently was receiving advice from his supervisors. When more officers arrived, he insisted that he had injured his back. The result could have been a “52x” — police jargon for a procedure in which officers take an injured suspect to a hospital, where he is treated and released. Any charges are filed later.
Instead, Morales finally ended up at the detention center, where he was booked and his blood was drawn at 10:30 a.m. (conspiracy theorists have groused about the five-hour buffer before the blood draw). In any case, a surreptitious 52x was possibly foiled, if indeed it ever was an aim.
Did the scrutiny of the local newspaper keep them honest?
Can’t say. But I do wonder whether Winder would’ve flown under the public’s radar without local journalism.
