Convicted Murderer of Gay Man Gets Parole } The Community is Fighting-There are Tools if You Want to Help

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Convicted Killer Jon Buice to be paroled in October 2011

Houston, Texas – With less than half his sentence served, the convicted murderer of a Houston gay man is to be paroled.  The LGBTQ community and crime victims’ advocates are up in arms to stop it.  Jon Buice, the last incarcerated member of the infamous “Woodlands Ten” who murdered 27-year-old Paul Broussard on July 4, 1991, is going free unless the Parole Board changes its mind.  In a 2-0 decision handed down on Friday, the board unanimously acted to approve Buice’s parole over the protests of his victim’s mother.  Nancy Rodriguez, who has stalwartly advocated for Buice to remain behind bars throughout the years, has told KHOU-TV that she has asked the members of the board to reconsider their decision.

Paul Broussard’s killing made national headlines in 1991 as a clear case of cold blooded hate crime murder.  A gang of teens traveled from the Woodlands, an upscale northern suburb of Houston, to the Montrose neighborhood, looking for gays to bash.  Their ploy was to ask a man on the street to direct them to a gay bar, and then, assuming his answer would incriminate him as a gay man, to assault and abduct him for a night of terror. Broussard, a young, unsuspecting banker, became their target.  The youths dragged him to a park where they savagely attacked him with their fists, steel-toed boots, nail-studded two-by-fours, and a knife.  Buice, who wielded the knife, stabbed Broussard three times with vicious efficiency, and “gutted him like a deer,” according to one commentator.  Of the ten in the gang, five received significant jail time.  Buice was sentenced to 45 years in prison because he did the slashing and stabbing of the innocent gay man.

Paul Broussard and his mother, Nancy Rodriguez

In the years since the trial, all but Buice have been released into society.  Because of the heinous nature of the stabbing, Buice had been successfully kept in prison until now.  In prison, he has earned college degrees, and some say he has been a “model inmate.” Based on the assessment of his advocates, Buice has claimed he has been rehabilitated and no longer offers and threat to society. Paul Broussard’s mother is not buying it.  As reported in this blog last year, when parole was denied her son’s killer, Nancy Rodriguez has said that any remorse on Buice’s part is too-little-too-late, and is fabricated by his desire to get out of jail. Mrs. Rodriguez has often said that she prayed her son’s killer would stay in prison for at least 27 years–one year in captivity for each year of Paul’s unfinished life.

Reaction to the Parole Board’s decision was swift.  Andy Kahan, crime victims’ family advocate, told KHOU: “We had anticipated, and certainly hoped, that it would be denied. Our efforts were in seeing how long it would be denied. It was stunning.” Kahan went on to say that he and his organization will fight the decision, vowing that, even if they lose, they will go down “kicking and screaming” because of the implications of the decision for other victims’ families and friends. “This decision sends chills down not only to Nancy’s family but to other families of murdered children in hoping that they don’t have to undergo the same ordeal,” he said.  Noel Freeman, President of the Houston Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Political Caucus, says that Buice needs to remain behind bars, and he will work to flood the parole board with “thousands” of letters appealing to board members to reverse their decision. ”There are people on death row who have done far less heinous crimes that what Jon Buice did,” Freeman said to KHOU. ”We’re going to encourage all members of the community to write the parole board, write their representatives, write their state senators. We will mobilize the community. The community mobilized when Paul was murdered back in 1991.”

The two members of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles assigned to Huntsville, where the decision was made to grant Buice a parole are Rissie L. Owens (term expires 2015) and Thomas A. Leeper (term expires 2013). They do not have to reconsider what they have done under law. But if Nancy Rodriguez, Andy Kahan, and Noel Freeman have anything to do about it, they will have plenty of mail to read from across the Lone Star State and from around the nation.

Huntsville Board Office, Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles contact information:

1300 11th St., Suite 520 

P.O. Box 599

Huntsville, TX 77342-0599

936-291-2161
936-291-8367 Fax

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