Alice Gonzalez walked into her brother's law office on the morning of July 18, 2017, and found his coat on the hook. His Bible open on the desk. His truck in the parking lot. His gun was gone.
She called 911.
Ernesto Gonzalez, 62, was known across Harlingen and the Rio Grande Valley as El Gallito -- the Little Rooster. He had earned that name in court, where his combative and aggressive style made judges and opposing counsel sit up straight. He had spent decades running a solo law practice and served as mayor of the nearby town of Primera.
He also had enemies. In June 2017, weeks before he vanished, he filed formal complaints accusing his sister's home healthcare business of patient abuse and Medicaid fraud. On July 13, 2017, he went to court to ask for a protective order against five family members. In his affidavit he wrote that he carried an unloaded pistol in his truck "because I fear for my life." He told family that cartel members had once pistol-whipped him and left him unconscious. On his phone, he had saved a photo of what looked like a dead man, sent to him as a warning. The message said only "Ernest."
Five days later, he vanished.
Alice -- El Gallito's sister and the mother of the man police would eventually arrest -- was the one who found the empty office and made the call. She had no doubt there was a long list of people who might want her brother dead. Her son, Salomon "Sonny" Campos Jr., was not on it.
Four years and four months later, a jury of six men and six women in the 445th District Court in Cameron County would agree with her. They needed less than three hours.
What happened in between is the subject of a federal civil rights lawsuit, a three-week murder trial, and one of the most damaging wrongful prosecution claims in South Texas in recent memory. A review of the federal complaint filed in October 2025, the trial record, reporting by the Texas Observer, and source materials obtained from the case reveals how Texas Ranger Raul Roy Garza and Harlingen Police built a capital murder case against the wrong man -- and how the evidence that might have cleared him kept disappearing.
Body camera footage from the key search went missing. Hard drives from the Harlingen Police Department were not lost -- they were disposed of. Witnesses' early video interviews vanished in the first six months of the investigation. A belly chain found near the skull in the grave became either a "signature" of the killer or a planted piece of evidence, depending on who you believed. A confidential informant Garza named in his own paperwork ceased to exist when he took the witness stand.
And when the case finally went to a jury in October 2024, cheers erupted in the courtroom as Sonny Campos was cleared in under three hours.
Campos did not walk out to the life he had before. He lost his federal career. His savings were gone. His wife, a 27-year elementary school teacher, had been forced to resign weeks before the verdict. The family had sold their house years earlier to pay legal bills. Today, Campos is asking a federal judge to hold accountable every officer and prosecutor who helped put him there.
The Texas Rangers cold case website still lists the murder of Ernesto Gonzalez as solved, with Solomon Campos listed as the suspect.
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The Texas Rangers are the state's elite investigative unit, purportedly brought in when cases are too complex or too visible for smaller departments. Ranger Raul Roy Garza spent seven years in the division before retiring in August 2023. By his own account, homicide investigation was not his specialty. He worked only a handful of murder cases in seven years. His true passion was fishing; he had been moonlighting as a guide in Port Mansfield since 2010.
He was already working another unsolved case -- the 2016 disappearance of Noemi Rodriguez, a 19-year-old McDonald's worker -- when Harlingen police brought him into the El Gallito case in 2018. Harlingen Police Sgt. Manuel Tovar had taken over the investigation in December 2017 and called the Rangers for help. "I kind of got forced to take the case," Garza told the Texas Observer in March 2025.
In August 2023, while capital murder charges against Campos were still pending, Garza retired from DPS to fish full time.
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Sonny Campos had every reason not to be a suspect.
He had no criminal record. He had worked as a police officer in Washington state, a Border Patrol agent in Arizona, and most recently as a federal contractor ferrying immigration detainees across South Texas. He had passed background checks throughout all of those jobs.
His relationship with his uncle was close. They had breakfast together regularly at El Rancho in Harlingen. When his grandmother died, El Gallito gave Sonny a tie to wear as a pallbearer. Sonny worried about his uncle's drinking; El Gallito was on DUI probation when he disappeared. Campos once confronted a store owner he believed had sold alcohol to his uncle.
He cooperated when investigators came to him. In December 2018, Campos drove himself to speak with Ranger Garza without being asked. During that interview, Garza told him to his face that he considered him a suspect. Campos kept talking anyway.
Garza built his case on cell phone GPS data that allegedly placed El Gallito's phone near Campos' home and his leased goat farm on the day of the disappearance. Garza also pointed to bank records showing Campos had made purchases at a corner store near one of El Gallito's last known locations, just days before the disappearance. And he noted that Campos had admitted, in his own words during interviews, that he had been to several of the same locations as El Gallito on the morning he vanished.
The prosecution called this a trail of evidence. The defense called it life in the Rio Grande Valley, where everyone shops at the same stores and drives the same roads.
In 2018, police searched Campos' goat farm on Kansas City Road in La Feria, about 10 miles southwest of Harlingen. Cadaver dogs found nothing.
On June 23, 2020, three years after El Gallito's disappearance, Garza returned with ground-penetrating radar. This time, Sgt. Tovar noticed something he had not seen before: a new barn had been built on the property since the previous search. Underneath the ground near that new barn, Garza said he spotted a "disturbance." Buried several feet down, with some bones missing, they found a skeleton confirmed by DNA as Ernesto Gonzalez. He had been shot in the head, execution-style.
Two days later, Sonny Campos was arrested and charged with capital murder.
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The prosecution presented what looked like a strong circumstantial case across three weeks of testimony that began September 23, 2024.
Cell phone GPS data placed Campos and El Gallito at overlapping locations the morning of the disappearance. A Homeland Security Investigations agent testified about digital evidence extracted from Campos' phone, including photos showing bricks that prosecutors said matched the bricks found inside the grave, stacked directly on the body. The jury also saw video of Campos at his own farm, filming Harlingen police officers during an earlier search -- and smiling while he did it. Prosecutors said that reflected the confidence of a man who knew the body was buried where the cops weren't looking.
And then there was the belly chain.
When officers excavated the site, they found a law enforcement-grade belly chain near the skull -- the heavy metal restraint system used to shackle prisoners during transport. Commander Jose Luis Garcia Jr. testified that the chain was found near the neck area of the skull and that it had hair adhering to it, consistent with having been on the body at the time of death. Prosecutors also called a weapons and restraints instructor who testified that he had personally trained Campos in the use of handcuffs and belly chains as part of his federal contractor work.
The prosecution's argument was clear: the belly chain was a signature. Only someone with Campos' specific training and access to that equipment would have used it.
The defense called it a plant.
Defense attorneys accused Commander Garcia and other HPD officers of gross scene insecurity. They alleged that security cameras at the search site had been tampered with during the excavation. They pointed out that the goat farm on Kansas City Road had no high fences, no security cameras, and no monitoring -- that multiple feuding family members had unrestricted access to the land for years before and after El Gallito's disappearance. The defense argued that anyone with a motive and access to law enforcement equipment could have placed the chain there.
The defense also had a specific alternative suspect in mind. Sgt. Tovar -- the lead police investigator, a prosecution witness -- said under cross-examination that he himself believed that Mary Ann, El Gallito's younger sister, had been involved in the murder. Mary Ann has never been charged. The defense pressed on why investigators had spent years building a case against Campos while leaving that name untouched.
Then there was the recording.
Prosecutors played a voice recording for the jury of a conversation between Ranger Garza and Alice Gonzalez -- the woman who called 911 the morning her brother vanished. She is also Sonny Campos' mother. On that recording, a Texas Ranger asked her directly whether she believed her son was involved in Gonzales' disappearance. Her answer, played in open court: she said her son "would do anything for money."
Alice later told the Texas Observer she believed her son was innocent. "My son's never been in jail. He's never been in trouble. He is a clean kid. He has been wrongfully accused."
But the jury heard her voice on that tape.
What the jury did not hear was most of the original investigation.
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In late 2017, within the first six months of the case, an HPD server crashed. That server held the primary video and audio recordings of key family interviews -- conversations recorded when memories were fresh and family loyalties were still in motion. Sgt. Tovar acknowledged in his testimony that he had to re-interview some witnesses because those original recordings were gone.
Standard data recovery protocols were available. HPD did not use them. The physical hard drives were disposed of, making any independent forensic review impossible. What replaced the original record were investigators' personal notes and re-interviews conducted years later, with witnesses who had had time to recalibrate their stories.
The institutional failure went further. Multiple videos Harlingen police had gathered after El Gallito's disappearance could not be located at trial. Body camera footage from the June 2020 search that found the body was never produced. DPS officials, pressed during testimony, could not explain its absence. There were photographs. No video.
Garza had also texted multiple witnesses during his investigation -- including some relatives El Gallito had named in his protective order request as threats. Those texts were erased when Garza turned in his DPS phone and laptop upon retiring. A court order had required him to turn over all case communications. Some were handed over. The rest, he said, were gone.
El Tejano obtained the federal complaint Campos filed in October 2025 and it adds detail not fully aired at trial. It alleges the DVR "crash" was actually an intentional override with no documentation. It alleges body camera footage from the June 2020 search was cropped and edited by DPS troopers. It alleges Officer Scott Vega destroyed or failed to protect evidence in his custody. It alleges Officer Tovar filed false affidavits to obtain search warrants and lied under oath about a confidential informant.
In his own case paperwork, Garza had used the notation "CI" -- standard law enforcement shorthand for confidential informant -- when requesting a listening device. Under oath at trial, he said no such informant existed. He claimed the notation referred to El Gallito's son, who had offered to secretly record family members. Defense attorneys told the jury that explanation could not be reconciled with standard law enforcement usage.
The complaint also alleges that Cameron County ADA Adela Garza called Campos a "murderer and killer" on a recorded Zoom call, and that prosecutors concealed a witness with exculpatory information and kept that witness off the stand.
Campos had filed internal affairs complaints against Ranger Garza (alleging perjury) and Officer Tovar (alleging perjury in a warrant affidavit) before trial. DPS opened an investigation of Garza and closed it without discipline. No public action against Tovar has been reported. The federal complaint alleges the officers who destroyed evidence were promoted.
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On October 15, 2024, the jury came back. Six men and six women. Less than three hours of deliberation.
Not guilty.
Cheers erupted in the 445th District courtroom.
Erika Campos, Sonny's wife, was emotional as she left the building. "They know the truth -- and the truth shall set us free. And it did today, praise God," she said.
Defense attorney Erin Gamez, who is also a Texas state legislator, spoke to the press outside. "An innocent man is allowed to enjoy his life," she said.
She also told reporters that she feared there might never be justice for El Gallito himself.
EJ -- El Gallito's son, the man who had helped investigators track his father's final cell phone movements and whose computer Garza never bothered to collect -- stood outside the courthouse and said the verdict was not what he had hoped for.
"It's been a long journey here, and it's not what I hoped for for my dad -- justice," EJ said. "I understand that it's their job, but I really think that it was one of the most evil acts that I've ever witnessed. I miss my father so much, I wish I could have him now."
The Cameron County District Attorney's Office issued a statement: "We knew going in, this was going to be a very challenging case, but it had to be tried. We respect the jury's decision and trust the process."
Ranger Garza, reached in March 2025, was not repentant. He still believes Campos is guilty.
Cameron County DA Luis Saenz, named as a defendant in Campos' lawsuit, has not commented. He and the other defendants are asking the federal court to dismiss the case under qualified immunity.
Campos is seeking $13.4 million: $2.1 million for his lost home, $1.3 million for his wife's lost teaching income, and $10 million in punitive damages.
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This was not Garza's only investigation to collapse.
In March 2021, Eric Eugene Armstrong, 63, was stabbed to death during a home invasion robbery in Harlingen. Garza helped process a cap left at the scene. Hairs collected from the cap were never sent to a DNA lab. Cameron County DA Saenz halted the suspect's trial mid-course, saying the investigation had been "mishandled" -- evidence lost, lab work never done, relevant videos that no one had told prosecutors about. The man charged, who had previously served 30 years for five aggravated robberies, was ultimately convicted only of evading arrest and sentenced to two years.
The same criticism. The same department. The same Ranger.
The Texas Rangers, as an institution, were already under intense public scrutiny. In 2022, seventeen Rangers were investigated for their failure to intervene during the Uvalde school shooting. Garza's supervisor retired. In 2023, Garza was among a new wave of departures that left the division shorthanded across the state.
Nobody has been charged with the murder of Ernesto "El Gallito" Gonzalez. The Texas Rangers cold case website, Reference Number 270, still reads: Solved. Solomon Campos is still listed as the suspect.
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