“Why would anyone want to kill an innocent high school girl?“
Carrie Ruiz and her husband, Lou, drive down a Texas highway. It’s the dark of night, in the fall of 1999. The couple, who are in their late forties are on edge. They’re crazed, and we don’t know what they’re capable of. All we know is that Carrie has a gun in her lap.
Carrie and Lou Ruiz have left their home in Humble, Texas, just outside of Houston. They’re on a chase after the killer of their teenage daughter, Felicia. Somehow, they know the kids from Felicia’s high school are involved.
The last time they saw Felicia was Halloween night. Felicia had begged them to let her go to a party, and reluctantly, they said yes. The Ruiz’s suspected this party had Latin King gang members present, and, when Felicia never came home that night, Carrie called police to file a missing persons report.
It didn’t take long before a detective came knocking at their door. He was there to inform them that Felicia has been found dead, stabbed multiple times. With this news, the Ruiz’s are not only stunned, they seem to go into a daze. How could this be true? Why would anyone want to kill their little girl? It’s not as if Felicia was ever part of a gang. In fact, Felicia was someone who had a bright future planned.
“You feel yourself die in that very instant,” Carrie told me. “And you don’t ever feel the life come back inside you again. You feel like you’ve gone totally insane in that moment. And you can’t breathe and you keep telling yourself, it’s not true, it’s not true. Just go and get her and bring her home.”
At this point, all her parents knew was that they last saw Felicia driving off to a Halloween party with Jesus Salazar, a Latin King gang member who was trying to convince Felicia to become a Latin Queen. Police questioned Salazar, and also questioned Felicia’ s boyfriend, Casey Wild, but both young men were bottled up. Both claimed did not see Felicia on Halloween night.
With police unable to catch the killers right away, the Ruiz’s lives are an emotional rollercoaster, and they feel more desperate as months go by. Their desperation turns into a hunt for justice when Felicia’s parents discover that the main suspects in the murder may have fled the state — and maybe have even fled the country.