The Convict Chronicles

The Nowhere Man

Albert Espinoza was about 60 years old when I first met him in the Bravo tank at the old Hidalgo County Jail. The Bravo tank was the mental illness tank at the jail back in the 1990's.  It was also known as the "10-96" tank which is the universal  cop code for "mental subject".  Albert was a thin man with thick salt and pepper hair and and a thick dark mustache. He had small dark eyes and smiled when he talked. He had a kind of soft but raspy voice and a heavy Mexican accent and did not speak a lot of English when he spoke at all. He had yellow rotting teeth. He was one of those kind of gentle persons that never gave any of the guards any problems. I remember Albert for 2 distinct reasons. When you worked his tank he would constantly come up to your work station and ask "Is the food coming?". All day long he would ask. He would ask and then smile in embarrassment afterwards and then walk away. And the other thing was that he would do was  walk a lot. He would just walk around the day room in the tank all day long and he would do this thing with his hands where it seemed like he was practicing karate. Even when his tank went out for yard time (which was only one hour a week for that tank) he would just walk up and down the court yard and do his karate moves. I guess that is why he was in the 10-96 tank. When he walked I would ask him "Hey Albert where are you going?" He would always say "Nowhere man nowhere" and he would chuckle and smile in embarrassment. I would also ask him where he lived and he would say "Nowhere man nowhere".  You couldn't get much more out of him than that. 

After a while I noticed that Albert never left the county jail. As a matter of fact there were more than a couple of 10-96's that were routinely at the jail for a very long time. No court dates, no visitors,  no nothing. I figured he had been there about a year when I checked his file up front and found that he had been arrested for a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespassing. I figured he was homeless and got caught on someone's property. The charge he was arrested for though would have meant at the most 30 days in jail.  I mentioned it to a supervisor who told me he would check into why Albert was still there.  

Routinely county jails try to get rid of inmates as quick as they can. It saves them money. But somehow the 10-96's fell through the cracks. They were a nuisance and nobody wanted to deal with them. Albert fell through that crack head first. He was there a whole two years before anybody that mattered noticed. When he finally did go to court it must have raised some eyebrows with attorneys in the court room because later I heard that Albert and several other 10-96's had filed a lawsuit against the county and won a large monetary award. I had already left the county jail for a police officer job when that happened. I figured it was a good thing that Albert had gotten some money and was probably doing okay.

I was in my first year as a police officer when I got a call of a person in the middle of the street throwing karate kicks at cars in the middle of town by the courthouse. When I got there I found Albert in the middle of the street kicking at cars. Cars were honking and getting out his way and still he stood there waiting for the next one. I got of my police car and called to him and he walked off quickly to the side walk and started walking. I caught up to him and asked him if he was okay and he didn't say anything or even look at me. I asked him where he was going and he stopped. He looked at me with a face of recognition and he smiled "nowhere man nowhere" and he walked off. I tried to stop him and ask him more questions but he did not stop. He was no longer in danger so I ended the call. I checked with other officers and they all knew him but they said he had not been around for awhile. They all told me that he lived in town somewhere and they would routinely see him just walking on the street and only once in awhile get these calls where he was causing problems in the middle of a street.

I got to see Albert walking the streets often over the next 2-3 years. I would try to stop him and talk to him but he would rarely talk. Often we would get calls of him being in a store and doing nothing wrong but he smelled bad so the store owners would call the police to throw him out. And he would leave peacefully. After a while I did get to notice that at certain times of the month he was clean shaven and had fresh clean clothes. Then he would wear that same clothes all month long. Then at the beginning of the month it would happen all over again. It wasn't to hard to figure out what was happening. It turned out he was receiving a monthly allotment from the civil lawsuit against the county and he had a sister who lived in town with her family and she  was in charge of taking care of him. At the beginning of the month they needed him to cash his check so the sister would send her husband out to find him and bring him home. They would bathe him and get him new clothes and then take him to the bank to cash his check. They would then promptly throw him out on the street until the next check day. 

I checked and found out Adult Protective Services was on the case but I have no idea what had happened and after awhile I just never saw Albert again. I checked with a friend of mine at the APS agency and she said that the money from the lawsuit had ended. She said that the sister reported that Albert left one day and did not return. There was a missing persons report made the day of the last check. The sister then left town herself the same week.

A couple of months later I was talking about Albert with the guys when one of the officers said they saw him just days before when he was on the way back from a vacation. He was walking down the street kicking at cars in Falfurrias,Tx. A town over 60 miles away. He must have just kept walking.  I know Albert had no other family. And I know he had no money. And I knew that now, in every which way possible, he was "nowhere".  I remember running a check on him years later to see if he had been removed from "missing person" status and he wasn't.  He must have been 70 years old by then.