|
By Nelson Zoch
On the Saturday of January 31, 1970, Officer Leon Griggs went to an approved extra job to provide for his family. He worked security at the Sacco Brothers Food Market, 2616 Blodgett, in Houston's Third Ward. Officer Griggs, who had been assigned to the Jail Division for the past ten years, was working this job on his day off and was due to be relieved at 5 p.m. that day by Officer H. L. Phillips.
At approximately 4:25 p.m., several black males approached Officer Griggs as he walked toward the front of the store. As he neared the checkout area inside the front door, the first man (later identified as Suspect No. 1) grabbed the officer's hands from the front. In the same instance, another man (Suspect No. 2) came from behind him, lifted the back of his uniform jacket and stuck a pistol in his back.
As Griggs struggled with the suspect in front who was attempting to control his arms, Suspect No. 1 shot the officer from the front, causing him to fall backwards. Both suspects fired more shots and while Griggs was lying on the floor on his back, Suspect No. 1 removed the officer's service revolver from its holster. He then pulled the officer up from the floor by his tie and used the gun to fire at least three more rounds into the defenseless officer's chest. Robbery was the apparent motive for this offense, yet the suspects took no money from the store.
The two men fled the store with the store manager in hot pursuit. The manager fired once in the air in an attempt to stop the suspects. However, Suspect No. 1 then turned around and fired three shots at his pursuer, missing him all three times. After Officer Griggs was shot, five other African-American males fled the store along with the two suspects. Memorial Ambulance picked up Officer Griggs and rushed him to Ben Taub General Hospital, where he was dead on arrival. He had been shot seven times.
Homicide Lieutenant J. E. "Pete" Gunn headed this investigation. P. S. "Paul" Nix and E. L. "Ed" Horelica were the primary detectives, assisted by W. J. "Bill" Wehr and Irvin E. "Mac" McComas. Witness information led to an arrest before the day was over. But the man arrested was not the right suspect. However, he remained in jail on other charges and proved to be helpful to investigators for the next several months in piecing together what happened that day at Sacco's on Blodgett Street.
Officer Griggs was a graduate of HPD Police Cadet Class No. 12 and had fourteen years and two months service at the time of his death. He was several weeks short of being forty-two years old. Funeral services were held from the Greater Zion Baptist Church, 3202 Trulley, on Wednesday, February 4, 1970. Burial followed at Cemetery Beautiful, 8205 Wheatley, in Houston.
Outstanding detective work over the next several months revealed the identities of several other subjects who were in the store at the time of the Griggs murder and fled when the shots were fired. Detectives Horelica and Nix, who later retired from HPD, said this was a very complicated and involved case due to the fact that so many individuals fled the store after the shooting. The investigation led to the identities of three of those individuals. But the witnesses were uncertain if these particular suspects were either of the two that actually shot and killed Leon Griggs.
The first big break in the case came in late March of 1970, when the service revolver of Officer Griggs was recovered in Dallas, where police arrested three African-American male hijackers in a food store robbery. One of the arrested suspects, Elmer Porter, fit the description of the Suspect No. 1, who was behind Officer Griggs and shot him in the back. The Dallas officers recovered Griggs' pistol from Elmer Porter's car.
After Nix and Horelica went to Dallas and questioned Porter, they learned from him that it was his car that was used as the getaway vehicle in the Griggs shooting event. More importantly, Porter gave them a confession outlining his involvement as well as the name of the other shooter and the two other suspects who were part of their group. Further investigation led to murder charges against Porter and a man named Wardell Ellis. Two other suspects were present but did not shoot Officer Griggs. They were located and gave statements implicating Wardell Ellis and Elmer Porter. No charges were filed against either of these two witnesses.
Porter, who was in custody, and Ellis were charged with murder in the death of Officer Griggs. Ellis was still loose and attempts were unsuccessful in locating and arresting him. However, on February 8, 1971, more than a year after the shooting, Houston investigators received information that a robbery suspect had been involved in a shooting with police officers in Atlanta, Georgia, and that a hijacker by the name of Raymond Hunter had been killed in this shootout. Further investigation revealed the true identity of "Raymond Hunter" to be Wardell Ellis. Fingerprints taken from Hunter's body were sent to Houston and proven to be those of Wardell Ellis.
Detectives Nix and Horelica eventually reached the conclusion that Griggs' murder happened while there were two separate groups of hijackers in the Sacco Brothers Food Market. Naturally, neither knew of the other. When the Wardell Ellis-Elmer Porter team shot Officer Griggs, the other group fled the store since they also were armed and did not want to be stopped for questioning. This led to the confusion in the witnesses' accounts.
The murder of a police officer going unsolved was abhorrent to all fellow police officers in the early 1970s. Fortunately, that tradition holds true right on up until today. It was also a day when the chief of police rewarded outstanding investigative work like this with a slap on the back and a Thank You. Neither the city nor the department ever officially commended Detectives Nix and Horelica for their tireless dedication to duty in this case.
Paul Nix retired in 1973 and worked a number of years as a district attorney's investigator for Wood County in the east Texas railroad town of Mineola. He completely retired in 2002 and died in 2006. He also was an accomplished western artist. Nix and Horelica had earlier cleared another Houston police officer whodunit, that of Officer Louis Lyndon Sander in 1967. Nix, the aspiring artist, created a cartoon strip depicting the entire Sander case investigation. He never succeeded in marketing the strip.
Detective Horelica retired in 1991 after thirty-five years with the department. After his HPD retirement, he served a number of years as security director at Baylor College of Medicine.
Lieutenant Gunn left Homicide in 1974 and continued his HPD career in the Vice Division and, for many years, in the Criminal Intelligence Division as the commander of the Houston-Harris County Organized Crime Task Force. After many years of heart problems, he died in 2000.
Bill Wehr later made lieutenant and worked for a number of years in the Robbery Division before retiring to go into the air conditioning business. He retired from that line of work and lived in Houston to enjoy fishing around Galveston Bay. Mac McComas retired to Trinity, his wife's hometown, and continued to serve his community as municipal judge there. He died suddenly in 1996, just four months after the sudden death of his lovely wife, Jean.
Elmer Porter was tried for murder in the death of Officer Leon Griggs. A jury convicted him and gave him a life sentence. He was paroled in 1992, but this leave was revoked the following year and he was sent to the Ramsey Unit III.
Officer Griggs was survived by his wife Iona, their son Richard, who was three and one-half years old, and by Leon's son and daughter by a previous marriage, twenty-one-year-old Leon Jr. and nineteen-year-old Linda. Also, at the time of Leon's death, Iona was pregnant with twin daughters Lessie and Leslie. In 2002, Iona resided in Houston as did Richard, Lessie and Leslie. Linda married and lived near Houston, the mother of her son Marcus, who has four daughters. Leon Jr. was the father of one daughter, Leah.
Iona Griggs raised three children without a father. Two were born after their father's death and Richard has hardly any remembrance of his father. In 2002, Lessie commented about the events her father missed out on in the summer of 1970 when she and Leslie were born on June 9, Leon Jr. was married on June 19, and Marcus was born on June 20. Additionally, two more of Officer Griggs' children grew up without their father to support and guide them.
Iona said that Leon hailed from a rural area, Cook's Point near Caldwell in Central Texas, and he loved horses. "He could ride horses," his wife said. "He tried to teach me how to ride but he was unsuccessful. I grew up in Bryan, but not on a farm or ranch."
She met her future husband when he was working patrol in Third Ward with his partner, Robert Crane, who retired from HPD. Iona found Leon to be "a very quiet person who worked quite a bit. He was sociable and liked to have a little fun. He was a great teaser." Leon also was like many HPD officers - he worked extra jobs to provide a higher quality of life for his family. "He worked all these extra jobs," Iona Griggs recalled. "He worked in the jail from 5 a.m. until 2 p.m. Then he worked in some of these little clubs, like Walter's Lounge on Lockwood.
"He was always saying, ‘Be careful out there in those clubs.' He also worked at a grocery store. He never knew the grocery store would be the place (that would pose the greatest danger)." When he was not working, he was deacon at Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church. He would patrol the church parking lot on Sunday nights, accounting for the safety of people getting in and out of their cars. He also liked to travel with Iona to places in Mexico and to Louisville, Kentucky, where his sister, Ida Mae Parks, lived. Ida Mae, who was twenty years older than Leon, was like a mother to her younger brother the police officer.
On Saturdays, Leon Griggs worked an extra job at Sacco Brothers. On Saturday, January 31, 1970, he was due to get off at 5 p.m., when he would return home to Iona and Richard on the east side of Houston. Just thirty-five minutes from his normal quitting time, Leon Griggs was shot and killed by hijackers. He was the first black Houston police officer who gave his life in the line of duty.
The murder of this police officer, husband and father devastated his family. Iona was his second wife. Iona's pregnancy grew to be even more uncomfortable as she continued teaching school and caring for young Richard. "I became extremely heavy with the twins," Iona said. "There was not too much I could do. I was very uncomfortable at the time." Thankfully, she had help from Ida Mae Parks, who uprooted in Kentucky and moved to Houston to devote her life to helping Iona with Richard and the twins. She also had another plan.
"She was instrumental in raising us," Leslie Griggs, one of the twins, said. "She kept us together (with Leon Jr. and Linda), making sure we weren't raised away from each other, coming from two different marriages and everything." Iona Griggs said, "She kept them all together so they could get to know each other. They are very close now. That was a blessing. I sometimes wonder if Leon had lived if he could have pulled them together like that."
The 100 Club of Houston also pitched in to help Officer Griggs' surviving family. The Club invited Iona and Richard to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in February and presented them with a $4,000 check.
"After the twins were born, I couldn't go right back to work immediately," Iona said. "I think I stayed off a year. Ida Mae moved here and helped keep the children for me when I went back to work." The twin girls, Leslie and Lessie, and Richard are all graduates of Prairie View A&M University. "My three didn't even know their father," Iona said. "Richard was three at the time and vaguely remembers a few things. Lessie and Leslie couldn't share anything. He was dead before they were born."
She raised her family as honest, church-going individuals, saying, "I thank God that they have all tried to grow up and be some kind of asset to the community instead of getting off in some kind of trouble. I'm so proud of them for that." In 2002, Leslie Griggs said she and Lessie experienced many difficult moments "not having a father, not being able to connect with whatever my other sister and brother shared. Our brother Richard was young but remembered quite a bit. We had our mother, who was great and provided what we needed. We didn't want for anything. We only have pictures of our father but not that touch or feel of knowing what that person was. It took a big adjustment. Of course, it (adjusting) is still there. A lot of our friends grew up with two parents. It was a pretty big void for both of us not having that."
Iona said, "I wanted them to be happy, peaceful and at home, and I think they were. I think the hardest time I have noticed with Leslie and Lessie were times when they were little kids and their friends would be talking about their daddies and places they went with their fathers, things they were doing. Seemed like sometimes they would kind of get emotional."
In 2002, Lessie was an accountant with a realty company, while Richard worked for a communications center. Leon Jr., a Texas Southern University graduate, was an executive for national corporation in Rochester, N.Y., and Linda Griggs Robinson, lived in Houston and worked for the state of Texas. Linda, a University of Houston graduate, had a son, Marcus, and four granddaughters. At one time, Marcus entertained the idea of becoming a police officer, going so far as to work as a guard in the state prison system for many years. Leon's daughter, Leah, graduated from the Fordham Law School in New York.
Ida Mae Parks died in 2000 at age ninety. Iona, also a TSU graduate and a retired teacher, never really retired. She worked four days a week in Coca-Cola's "valued youth" program - which encourages high school seniors to stay in school - as a supervisor at the elementary school level.
|
