Chris Bull

Jon Christopher Buice doesn’t look the part of a gay-bashing killer. Sitting behind a blue steel mesh in bleached white prison garb and T-shirt, the brown-eyed, baby-faced convict, even at 26, could pass still for the ordinary white suburban teenager he once was. Jon Christopher Buice in his white prison garb at the Texas Department of Corrections in Huntsville. Buice is serving the seventh year of a 45-year sentence for the July 1991 slaying of Paul Broussard, who was himself 26 when he was bludgeoned and stabbed to death by Buice and nine of his friends on a Houston street. Even today, Buice seems unsure how he ended up behind bars, a ward of the Texas Department of Corrections in Huntsville, about an hour drive due north of the city where the murder occurred. “Everything is still a blur to me,” he says in a voice so soft it is nearly lost in the din of iron bars opening and slamming. “I think about it every day, but I’m still not sure why everything happened

As soon as Manuel Zuniga heard the news, the fate of his younger brother, Pablo, flashed before his eyes. A television station in Austin, Texas, was reporting that a young Hispanic man had been stabbed to death in the middle of the night on a secluded bike path that parallels Town Lake, the scenic river bisecting the city, just south of the state capitol building. Manual Zuniga mourns his brother’s death and the suspended sentence his brother’s murderer received. The victim wasn’t identified by name, but Manuel, then 36, knew that his 31-year-old sibling often walked that route to and from his apartment. A childhood battle with German measles had left Pablo deaf and mute, but he retained such a trusting disposition that Manuel often worried would make him a target. As much as he admired Pablo’s determination to be independent, he couldn’t help but fret about his safety. Clicking off the TV, he tried to concentrate on something else. A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was a friend, confirming his dreadful premonition.