Free Murdered Innocents by Corey Mitchell Page A

Alex Briones was recently arrested for the murder of an elderly woman in Windcrest, north of San Antonio. He bound the woman, raped and sodomized her, shot her in the head, and lit her body on fire. Briones decided it was time to come clean about another murder.
    Or rather, murders.
    Briones’s written statement started off with, “I want to tell Sergeant Huckabay . . . about my involvement in the deaths of the four girls who were killed on December the 6th, 1991, at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop on West Anderson Lane.”
    Briones claimed that he and an unnamed buddy “borrowed” a truck earlier that day and drove over to the Hillside Center to plan a burglary. Briones added he burglarized a nearby apartment a few weeks earlier, so he felt comfortable in the neighborhood. After they cased the shopping center, Briones went home while his buddy returned the stolen truck.
    Later that same evening, Briones and his friend hopped the Metro bus to Anderson Lane. The two men got off and began looking at various stores. They stopped in front of the yogurt shop, peered through the front window, and noticed that there were no customers inside. Briones spotted one girl, Eliza, cleaning tables in the front dining area. He spotted another girl, Jennifer, behind the counter. He motioned to his friend and the two men slithered inside.
    “I noticed that the keys to the door were in the lock on the inside of the door,” Briones recalled. He asked Eliza if he could use their rest room. She smiled and told him yes. Briones headed toward the back of the store, behind the serving counter, and into the men’s rest room.
    “I went inside the rest room and I smoked some crack.” He stayed there for ninety seconds or so, while his buddy hung out in the front of the store. He returned and stood beside his pal.
    Without warning, Briones grabbed Eliza by the arm, pulled out a gun, and stuck it to the back of her head.
    “If you cooperate, I ain’t gonna hurtcha,” he whispered to her. He forced her back to the counter, where Jennifer stood. He pointed the gun at her and told both girls to get down on the floor behind the counter. His buddy dragged the girls over to the cash register. Briones grabbed Eliza and pulled her up on her feet. He pointed his gun at her and demanded she open the register. She took out the register key and did as she was told.
    Briones could not remember if he took anything from the register. He did remember herding the two girls to the back of the store. He could not believe his eyes. His friend had two additional girls on the floor, one on her back and one on her stomach. They were younger than the two girls in the front.
    Briones’s buddy was stripping the clothes off the two girls. He tied their feet together and their hands behind their backs. He inserted gags into their mouths. He grabbed the girl who was on her stomach and raped her. The other girl’s sobs were muffled by the gag.
    While his buddy violated the girl, Briones tied up Eliza and Jennifer. Both girls’ cries for help were upsetting him. He asked them to “be quiet” but they would not listen. After he constrained both girls, he began to disrobe them.
    “One of the girls that was with me was real young and pretty,” he recalled to Huckabay. “She had blondish colored hair and a real good body. I don’t know what I did with the other girl, but I raped the young one.” He forced her to lie facedown while he ravaged her from behind, her hands tied behind her back.
    Briones claimed to not quite remember everything else so vividly. He blamed it on alcohol, crack, and cocaine. He did, however, remember hearing gunshots ring out.
    “All of a sudden, I started hearing shots. They were real loud. My ears started ringing.” In his drug-fueled haze, he claimed that he looked down at the girl.
    “I remember shooting the girl that I had raped, in the back of the head,” he solemnly admitted, “and she was screaming.”
    After he shot the