Episode 21: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. On today’s episode, we continue with our ‘Deaths During the Holidays Series’ and take a look a two different stories where the fear of being homeless leads to horrendous acts of murder and mayhem.
Ready for this? Listen in…
SHOWNOTES:
• There was an 18 year old named Alex Valdez. I don’t know the background, I couldn’t find very much information on his parents, but he had been staying with his aunt and her boyfriend for about six months. The boyfriend was Silvestre Diaz-Hernandez and he was 41 years old. Evidently the aunt and boyfriend told Alexis that he could live with them as long as he worked and continued to go to school, as well as help paying the bills. But as time went by, he decided he was going to quit school, he got a little more lax, he quit his job, he wasn’t really holding up his end of the bargain. So on Christmas Eve of 2013, they asked him to leave. I don’t know where he would have gone. I don’t know where his parents were or if he had siblings. Like I said, I could not find that information. But on that evening, his aunt was attending a party. Alexis started drinking. You know what happens when you drink a lot. You kind of get, or some people get angry. Some people get really happy, but he evidently got angry. The two, Diaz and Alexis went to the store to buy beer, after Diaz returned home from visiting his family. Diaz’s girlfriend, the aunt, was attending a party, so she wasn’t there. Alexis had hid a hammer behind the door. (02:04)
• Great Vaughn, Texas is known as the Christmas capital of Texas, it’s a beautiful city. There’s all sorts of events. It’s very family friendly, but bad things happen everywhere, it doesn’t matter. So Aziz Yazdanpanah, and we’re going to call him Aziz from here on out, was a 56 year old. And he and his wife had apparently been having some marital issues and had separated. So they had a 3,100 ish square foot home in Collyville, which is kind of a well-to-do neighborhood here around where we’re at. They lived there together with their two daughters and their family seemed relatively normal. Not a lot going on, nothing that really drew attention to themselves. They dressed well and everyone thought they were just a happy family, which is very common. We see that many times we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. This was actually the case in this particular incident, but the wife had left him and she’d moved literally two miles down the road into an apartment in Great Vaughn. So she wasn’t living far from him. I believe that she was trying to be amicable. She wanted her ex-husband to see her daughters. Although the problem was he had not worked in quite some time. He was in the mortgage business and had not worked in I think four years. (06:44)
• Now, when she moved out of the house in Colleyville and into the apartment in Great Vine, they actually had no water or electricity, because she was paying the bills, and then she stopped paying the bills. He had no income because he hadn’t worked in four years. And she took a big part of the furniture. So, she left him with a 3,100 square foot home with no water, no electricity, and very little furniture. So that, probably on top of everything else, did not make him too terribly happy. Now, after he shot everybody, he put one of the guns in his brother-in-law’s hand before he killed himself. So he was trying to make it look like the brother-in-law had something to do with the murders, or was a part of it. They determined that the brother-in-law had not shot either one of the weapons and determined that that weapon was actually placed in his hand by Aziz after he shot everyone, just before he shot himself. (10:08)
• Years ago, when I worked in Harris County, there was a homeless gentleman who would sell newspapers in a median in front of a gas station, and no one knew who he was. I think they called him Bubba, but no one knew his legal name. And he would go into the gas station and get a drink and people would address him as Bubba, although that wasn’t actually what his name was. He had no family, he had no home. He would sell these newspapers for the Houston Record Chronicle and then use what little bit of change he made off of those to feed himself. And so, I just remember he was a very thin older man and he had a very bushy gray beard and a lot of gray hair. And one morning he was struck by a car. We were never able to find out who he was. I just remember that he was in our unidentified remains cooler for quite some time. And I think they eventually just removed a phalanges or a finger and kept that for DNA purposes in case family ever came forward. But, he may not have had any family. Like I said, we didn’t even know who he was to actually use his name to search for relatives, which I always thought was super sad. And then again, I thought, man, this guy’s actually trying to work and trying to make a little bit of money and support himself. (13:09)
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