If this had happened anyplace else but Pasadena

Fortunately, I didn't spend a lot of time in Pasadena, Texas, but it was enough to tell me I never wanted to go back. I won't go into the whys, but my parents moved a lot when I was growing up and I wound up not staying in any one place very long. The clan landed in Pasadena just in time for me to complete the final semester of my senior year of high school. Upon graduation, I left Pasadena behind for college, only two return twice and then only briefly. My mother wasn't so lucky. Within a year, my father died and my mother never moved again until late in her life. But I'll get to that in a second.

My first return visit to Pasadena -- 20 years after I left -- was to attend a party at Gilley's that followed the Houston grand premier of the movie "Urban Cowboy." I had remembered Gilley's as a comparatively small bar on Shaver Street in Pasadena and I had spent time with a lot-less-famous Mickey Gilley there on many occasions. His mega-club, out on Spencer Highway, was the one spotlighted in the movie and it was actually financed and built 11 years after I left town by local con man Sherwood Cryer.

My second trip back came when I learned my mother had Alzheimer's and was about to be placed in an assisted living center in Pasadena that made St. Elsewhere seem like the Mansion on Turtle Creek. I quickly drove to Pasadena, packed my mother along with much of her clothing and other personals in the Jeep and took her to Austin to place her in a facility that, of course, I couldn't really afford.

But that's not the point of this story either. The point of the story is that Pasadena, at the time I lived there, was the most segregated city I had ever lived in. Not because whites were confined to one part of town and blacks to another. No, it was the most segregated city I had ever lived in because blacks did not live there at all. There was not a single black resident of Pasadena when I lived there, in the entire history of the town before I lived there, and for many years after I left. It was revealed, after a myriad of lawsuits were filed, that all the realtors had an unwritten agreement among themselves that they would not sell any property to African-Americans. Apartments also went along with this policy. Blacks were effectively barred from Pasadena, Texas.

That's why this story about a man in Pasadena getting away with the murder of two immigrants (he thought they were blacks) didn't surprise me when I read it. It made me angry, but it didn't surprise me. I felt as though I should be reassured by some police detective who could pat me on the shoulder and tell me "Forget about it, Jake. It's Pasadena."