Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [74]
Feit discusses the Catholic Church’s early history in Rome and its original concepts about charity to the poor.
Near the end of the conversation, he observes, “You know, we all [would] like to write the story of our life. And we all like happy endings.”
In Texas, investigators and the Garza family are fighting to have a special prosecutor brought in to review the murder case. They hope state and federal officials will work around the local D.A. and get all the information in the case to a grand jury for a change.
For Garza’s family and many others in south Texas, the happiest ending they could hope for would be seeing Feit sitting in court facing charges in the murder of their beloved Irene.
On a return visit, Feit implores the visitor to judge him by his last forty-five years of service to his church and community. Remember, he told that Texas Ranger two years ago that the Father John Feit who lived in south Texas in 1960 no longer exists.
“Perhaps we’re all operating with different ideas of justice,” says Noemi Ponce-Sigler. “All I know, though, is [about] the pain this has caused so many people.
“All I know is that Irene was murdered, and that nobody has seen justice.”
ROBERT NELSON has been a writer for the Phoenix New Times for six years. In that time, he has won the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award from the Death Penalty Information Center, has been twice a finalist for Arizona Journalist of the Year, and has twice won the John Kolbe Award for political writing. In 2003 he won the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ first-place award for political commentary. Nelson is finishing his first nonfiction novel, Bleeding Arizona, which follows a clan of violent abolitionists from the fight for a free-state Kansas to the postwar battle for the soul of the wild new territory of Arizona.
Coda
John Feit has yet to face charges in the murder of Irene Garza. But the fight for his indictment continues in southern Texas, where the Garza family and former law enforcement officials are pushing for the ouster of District Attorney Rene Guerra, who has failed to prosecute the case in the face of compelling evidence pointing to Feit. Feit continues to live in Phoenix, Arizona, and continues to help the city’s underprivileged and elderly.
S. C. Gwynne
DR. EVIL
FROM Texas Monthly
ON JUNE 8, 2003, A FORMER POPEYES COOK from Houston named Cecil Viands died following routine spinal surgery at Vista Medical Center Hospital, in Pasadena. The cause was a massive infection. Under normal circumstances, Viands’s death might have been seen as a bit of horrifyingly bad luck, the sort of thing that happens to one unfortunate patient in a million. But luck had little or nothing to do with it. The immediate assumption in much of the local medical community was that Viands had died because of the incompetence of his doctor: an orthopedic surgeon and one-man surgery mill named Eric Heston Scheffey.
Viands’s death was only the latest episode in a long, grim tale of malpractice stretching back more than a decade. Scheffey had performed five surgeries on him since 1992. In complex and largely unjustified procedures that few orthopedists would ever have attempted, he’d methodically removed a large portion of Viands’s lower spine, taking out six vertebral disks, a good deal of bone, and alternately inserting and removing intricate arrays of screws, rods, bone-graft cages, and electronic growth stimulators. His activities went well beyond what consulting doctors had recommended or what the patient had authorized. In a single operation, he’d cut into Viands’s spine in seven different places—virtually unprecedented except in cases of severe accidents. He’d removed bone in order to decompress fourteen nerve roots—again, something most surgeons would never have even considered. According