The Killing of José Campos Torres

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The Killing of José Campos Torres

March 2023 By Mimi Swartz March 2023

Decades before the recent police violence in Memphis, a brutally beaten Latino man was tossed by officers into a Houston bayou and drowned. The protests that followed continue to echo in the city to this day.

Editors’ note: As part of Texas Monthly’s fiftieth anniversary year, we’re offering, each month, a fresh perspective on an important episode from the past half century.

 In the early hours of a cloudy morning in May, a 23-year-old Mexican American man found himself surrounded by six Anglo Houston police officers. By then, the man, José Campos Torres, had been badly beaten. He stood on the edge of a drop of about twenty feet overlooking the murky waters of Buffalo Bayou, near downtown Houston. “Let’s see if this wetback can swim,” one of the cops said, in what were likely the last words Torres heard before he was pushed into the bayou. His body was found two days later, on May 8, 1977, drifting near the water’s edge. Such a story had been and would remain a familiar one in American life: law enforcement officers holding the power of life and death over a young man of color. 

In 1970s Houston, however, there were many citizens who didn’t assign much meaning to Torres’s death, even as the story made the front pages of the newspapers.