Officer Lawrence Cadena, 43, Dallas Police Department
Murdered December 13, 1988 Officer Cadena was shot eight times at close range during an undercover drug sting operation. After the shooting a co-defendant reached over Cadena’s body and ripped open his shirt and pants, presumably looking for the drug money. Officer Cadena’s murder was memorialized in the 1990 TV movie "In the Line of Duty".
The shooter, Javier Suarez Medina was a Mexican national who had lived in the United States since he was three years old. In May of 1989, Medina was convicted and sentenced to death. On August 15, 2002, after 13 years on death row, Medina was executed. Among his last words spoken was the phrase "Viva Mexico". Medina was given a hero’s sendoff at his funeral in Mexico which was attended by 6,000 people.
The Mexican government actively fought the conviction and proposed execution arguing that Medina had not been advised of his rights under the Vienna Convention – an issue Medina raised for the first time one week before his execution. Mexican President Vicente Fox canceled a planned trip to meet with President Bush in Crawford, Texas in protest of the execution.
Officer Cadena, was an American citizen of Mexican ancestry. In a letter to President Fox, Cadena’s son Lawrence Rudy Cadena, also a police officer complained "Why is Mexico, the country of my children, defending a man who killed their grandfather?" No one from the Mexican government has ever contacted the Cadena family.
Trooper Robert Clodfelter, 34, Oregon State Police, Murdered, September 30, 1992
Murdered December 13, 1988
On September 30, 1992, Trooper Clodfelter arrested Francisco Manzo Hernandez for driving under the influence. Rather than leave Manzo’s passengers stranded on the highway, Clodfelter agreed to transport them to their nearby residence. All three men were placed in the back of his patrol car. When the dispatcher could not get an answer on the radio, a car was sent to investigate. Trooper Clodfelter was found seated in his patrol car about four blocks from the scene of the arrest with four bullets to the back of his head.
Manzo-Hernandez was an illegal alien with a long violent history of assault and drug use.
On October 2nd, after one of the largest manhunts undertaken in Oregon history and the offer of a large reward, Hernandez was captured while hiding in a barn on the same street he had shot Clodfelter. Hernandez was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. If Hernandez had made it back to Mexico, and extradition sought today, he could not have been extradited unless assurances of a determinate sentence were given.
A year after Trooper Clodfelter’s death, his wife of one month, unable to overcome her great grief, chose to end her life. Rene was a fellow law enforcement officer.