His death was just ruled a homicide. Victim’s sister wants case reconsidered
Rocio Rosales wants to know whether investigators and the prosecutor’s office plan to take another look at her brother’s death now that the coroner’s office has ruled he died in a homicide.
She says no one told her about the coroner’s findings. Last she heard from authorities, she said they told her a medical condition like a stroke or seizure might have caused her brother’s death on Sept. 26.
She learned that 46-year-old Raul Rodriguez is a homicide victim after reading an online story about his autopsy results published Tuesday afternoon by The Eagle.
She called a reporter with one question about her brother’s case: Does this change anything?
“The family has just been kind of waiting to hear some kind of answers to if anything was going to be done — if there was going to be any kind of justice for my brother,” she said in an interview.
“Knowing some new information (about how he died) ... it just makes it harder.”
The Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center determined Rodriguez died of blunt force injuries to his head, according to an autopsy report filed in Sedgwick County District Court on Nov. 19. The report says he was pushed during a drunken argument on Sept. 25, fell to the ground and hit his head, which left a laceration on his scalp.
He also had bruises on his head, tongue, torso and other parts of his body, as well as a skull fracture and brain hemorrhages. But he refused medical treatment.
He was found dead in a living room chair the next day. His manner of death? A homicide, the autopsy report says.
Earlier this week the Sedgwick County District Attorney in an email to The Eagle said his office declined to file charges “given the inability to establish all the elements of a crime” when Wichita police investigators presented the case on Oct. 7. The D.A., Marc Bennett, wrote then that: “It was clear that a pre-existing medical condition could not be ruled out as substantially contributing” to Rodriguez’s death.
The autopsy report noted three significant conditions Rodriguez had other than the trauma injuries: high blood pressure-related heart disease, chronic alcohol abuse and cirrhosis, or scarring, of the liver.
The D.A.’s spokesman, Dan Dillon, said Wednesday that Bennett was unable to comment further when The Eagle posed Rosales’ question to his office.
Not all homicides are the result of criminal activity, recklessness or negligence and therefore lead to the filing of criminal charges. Wichita police have investigated 36 homicides so far this year, but only 29 have been considered criminal in nature. Rodriguez’s death wasn’t one of them, a police spokesman said when The Eagle asked.
Rosales, who lives in Wichita and visited often with Rodriguez, told The Eagle that after authorities told her a medical condition may be to blame for her brother’s death, no one followed up with her family to say that blunt force trauma and homicide were the official rulings.
She said her brother was a longtime alcoholic and unemployed electrician who had struggled to abandon his drinking habit and recently decided to attend an in-patient rehabilitation program and weekly meetings.
For a while, he even stopped drinking and was working odd jobs to make money, she said.
Reconnecting this year with his 18-year-old daughter “was the key to him turning his life around.”
“I would ask Raul, ‘Are you OK? Are you happy?’ He said yeah, that he just needed to focus on rehabilitating and getting better,” Rosales said.
“He was really trying. He was really trying hard.”
But on Sept. 25 - the day before he died - he got into a drunken argument with a roommate who he had lived with for about a year in the 3400 block of North Market, she said. Rosales said police told her that her brother may have threatened the roommate with a screwdriver during the fight.
She’s not sure what the argument was about.
Rodriguez was shoved, fell and ended up with what Rosales described as a three-inch cut on the back of his head.
She said paramedics bandaged him up and tried to convince him to go to the hospital.
But he said no.
“In his head, he probably though, ‘Oh, I don’t need stitches. It’ll close up.’”
Rosales said she pleaded with the paramedics by phone to take him anyway. They couldn’t if he wasn’t willing, she said she was told.
Rosales says she was devastated when she found out her brother died and wonders now if there’s anything more for investigators and prosecutors to do.
“He was a happy person. ... He was kind. He always wanted to help others. You had anything that was going on, you had any kind of work at your house, he would come help,” Rosales said.
“I hope they look into it a little bit more,” she said about her brother’s death. Her family just wants “some kind of justice.”
This story was originally published December 1, 2019 at 5:01 AM.
