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In 1993, on the 20th anniversary of 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez’s murder at the hands of a white Dallas police officer, the City Council pledged to “never allow such a travesty to reoccur.”
It wasn’t a particularly bold statement. Promising to stop police officers from playing Russian roulette with unarmed children accused of burglarizing a Coke machine doesn’t set the bar terribly high, and the proclamation carefully avoided any suggestion that city of Dallas might have been at fault.
When mourners gathered at Rodriguez’s graveside this July to mark 40 years since his death, the city still remained steadfast in its refusal to apologize, instead trotting out the same tired two-decade-old City Council resolution.
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Then, at Saturday’s big, citywide Conversation about Race confab, Mayor Mike Rawlings surprised everyone by saying he was sorry.
“I got a lot of questions about apologizing for the death of Santos Rodriguez,” Rawlings said. “I don’t have any clue why this city hasn’t apologized for that. There’s no excuse for that. And on behalf of the citizens of Dallas, the Dallas City Council, the Dallas Police Department, we wholeheartedly apologize for the death of Santos Rodriguez.”
Bessie Rodriguez’, Santos’ mother, who heard of the mayor’s apology second-hand while she was cooking breakfast, was pleased. But she wants to hear it from Rawlings himself, and she wants the city to prove that it’s truly sorry.
See also: Four Decades Later, the City Still Won’t Apologize for Santos Rodriguez’s Murder
“It’s the beginning, you know – because we’ve been waiting for so long,” she told NBC 5. “This is the beginning of something.”
