'Every Murder is Different': Dallas Homicide Unit Seeks Justice for the Dead

JoAnn Castillo was watching TV and winding down for bed about 10 p.m. Dec. 12 when she got a text: “Shooting at 5847 Stretch Drive. One deceased male at scene and one witness, the reporting person.”

Murders in Dallas tend to happen after midnight, the homicide detective said, so she had hoped to get a few hours of sleep.

This one came early.

Castillo arrived at the west Oak Cliff apartment complex shortly before 11 p.m., and met first with the patrol officers who responded. They told her what they’d found — witnesses, surveillance footage. She took each piece of information with skepticism. She had to, she said, until she could see it for herself.

Castillo crept up a short stone staircase built into a grassy hill. The body was mere feet away, face turned left where the hill crests. She shined a flashlight and found gold confetti mixed into the grass, resembling the same sheen as the brass shell casings she was searching for.

She eyed the people around her, took note of behavior and who was where. She studied buildings and looked for windows. They tell her who could’ve had a vantage point, who could’ve seen what happened.

Castillo, 47, was born in Laredo but raised in Dallas. She started at the department 16 years ago, but her goal was to join the homicide unit, where she landed in 2023 and plans to stay at least a decade.

It’s a calling, she said. “I believe you have to have it in you.”

As the scene’s lead detective, Castillo delegated tasks — though, by now, her squad has fallen into a rhythm. One person reviews surveillance footage, another gets the search warrant.

“We responded to a scene — that doesn’t mean it’s over,” Castillo said. “That’s barely a beginning. That’s the initial stage of everything.

“Now it’s the real work: putting the puzzle together.”

The Dallas Morning News spoke with several members of the Dallas police homicide unit, from detectives to their lieutenants, to understand what it takes — personally and professionally — to investigate the crime that took 183 lives in 2024.

The interviews took place during The News’ yearlong “Life and Loss in Dallas” effort, in which reporters profiled more than 100 victims and probed what officials are doing to address the violence. In police work, homicide detectives bear a distinct burden. Case by case, they come to know how a loss can be ruinous to a home, a community, a childhood.

On the night of Dec. 13, Detective Laurent Swanson was home resting from the overnight stint when he got a text: “Officers responding to what they thought was a vehicle accident at 3811 Academy Drive. When Dallas-Fire Rescue responded, they noticed something different.”

" My mindset is, ‘It’s game time,’ ” Swanson said. He got dressed, jumped in the car and drove as more messages lit up his phone, bits of information gathered by the first responding officers.

He arrived about midnight to a Pleasant Grove neighborhood rattled by violence. An SUV was lodged into a tree, feet from a front porch, with two victims shot dead in the front seats. Despite the chill and hastening rain, residents stood outside and took photos, checked their doorbell cameras and told police what they saw.

Swanson, 43, is from the small town of Lackawanna, N.Y. He’s been with Dallas police for about 12 years, the homicide unit for just over a year. It’s a dream job, he said, helping families find some sort of closure. Putting real bad people away.

Swanson said he works a scene by trying to be everywhere. He wants to see every part of it, to engage with neighbors, eye the evidence spotted by others and peer inside the vehicle.

" You don’t want to be the detective that can’t solve a murder,” Swanson said. “There’s a sense of pride. There’s a sense of hard work. There’s a sense of urgency.”

The day before the west Oak Cliff killing, the squad went out about 6 p.m. to a victim lying in a vacant lot. They stayed all night, then returned in the daytime to look for more evidence.

By the time the week was over, their squad of seven detectives had responded to seven murders.

“Every murder is different,” said Lt. Benny Handley, who oversees the homicide unit. “I just have to keep going, no matter what the numbers are.”

From 248 to 183

In 2024, Dallas’ overall violent crime rate dropped for a fourth straight year. The city tallied about 9,029 offenses — 8.2% fewer than in 2023 — and reductions in murders, aggravated assaults and robberies. The most pronounced drop was the murder count.

Dallas’ murder rate was about 14 murders for every 100,000 people in 2024, according to city statistics. Police officials reported 183 murders — down 26.2% from 2023. That meant 65 fewer murder victims and a return to levels not seen since before the COVID-19 pandemic, which Dallas police brass have called their goal since the city’s spike to 254 murders in 2020.

That downward trend is in line with the nation, which early reports indicate saw plummeting homicide tallies for a third straight year, according to data compiled by AH Datalytics, a consulting firm that tracks homicides. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Memphis, Kansas City, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., each reported significant reductions in their 2024 murder counts.

While Dallas police’s murder tally accounts for the vast majority of homicide victims, the total number of people killed in city limits was higher. Police distinguish murders from what they label as justifiable homicides, which include people shot and killed by police or by people who kill in self-defense or in defense of others or property.

The News’ 2024 homicide count — which includes justifiable homicides and slayings in the city investigated by agencies other than Dallas police — was 203 killings, down from 275 in 2023. The News’ count is part of an effort to report on every homicide victim in the city because police do not publicly release details about every slaying, or do so only after being asked by the media.

Although dozens of cases remain unsolved, Dallas usually reports a higher murder clearance rate than the national average. Police officials said the department had a 61.8% clearance rate for murders in 2024 with 113 murders cleared the same year.

That often meant an arrest was made, but seven of those were cleared by exceptional means — which may include cases in which a grand jury declined to indict a suspect, or the suspect was killed or is presumed to have fled the country.

At least four more 2024 cases were cleared in 2025. In 2024, the department also cleared 36 murder cases from years prior, police officials said, bringing the overall clearance rate to more than 79%.

Nationally, police clear about half of the murder cases reported to the FBI, according to a 2024 study by the Pew Research Center. Nationwide clearance rates for violence are at their lowest levels since 1993, the research center reported, noting a 52.3% murder clearance rate for 2022. That’s down from the 64.1% clearance rate for murder cases in 2013, according to Pew.

‘These are people’s lives’

Interim Dallas police Chief Michael Igo said he’s “very happy” with his officers’ work and the city’s 2024 statistics. Every category of violent crime dropped except for business robberies, Igo said, adding that one-third of those tend to be shoplifting offenses that escalate.

Igo began to lead the police department in October after former Chief Eddie García left to join Austin city management. He said he intends to stay the course with the violence reduction plan launched under García, noting it has led to four years of overall reductions.

" You put that in terms of not just metrics or data — these are people’s lives that we’re saving,” Igo told The News in an interview.

The plan is based on the premise that small pockets of the city account for a disproportionate amount of violence. Since mid-2021, police have zeroed in on several dozen hot spots — or 330-foot-by-330-foot grids where crime is highest — to boost enforcement levels. Every 60 days, the department chooses a new set of grids, guided by crime data.

In addition to the grids, police officials targeted locations where they and other city agencies try to improve quality-of-life issues and disrupt criminal networks. Two locations are in a “maintenance phase” — 11511 Ferguson Road in Far East Dallas and 3550 E. Overton Road in east Oak Cliff, police officials said. Two other places were added to the department’s list last month: 9415 Bruton Road in Pleasant Grove and 8501 Old Hickory Trail in Red Bird.

The department partnered with nonprofits, including the South Dallas Employment Project, and agencies like the district attorney’s office to offer social services — such as job placement and housing — to incarcerated people re-entering society. The program has 54 clients, with more recruiting sessions expected in 2025, police officials said.

Igo laid out three top priorities for 2025: He wants to keep his “foot on the gas when it comes to violent crime” and is open to “moving resources to make sure that happens.” Already, he’s moved more officers to the fugitive unit, which tracks down suspects to make arrests.

His next priority is recruiting and retention — including hiring more officers from within Texas, he said. To study retention, he’s started to sit in on exit interviews with newer officers.

Lastly, he wants to look at DPD’s service levels from a quality-of-life standpoint and response times. Standard response time metrics haven’t been changed in decades, Igo said.

He’s unequivocal about his No. 1 goal: further reducing violent crime.

" People have a right to feel secure in their neighborhoods,” Igo said.

‘It’s not about us’

The center of the puzzle Castillo was starting to piece together was 21-year-old Xavien Minitt.

Minitt graduated from Cedar Hill High School, where he played trombone and earned the highest rank for students in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps — Cadet Lt. Col. Deputy Corp Commander. He had planned to join the Air Force.

Minitt loved fishing, watching stand-up comedy and cooking (though his family would, lovingly, clarify that he often overseasoned the food). He taught not only soccer but also music to the children of the Singing Hills Recreation Center in southeast Oak Cliff. They adored him, their Coach X.

The story of how he became one of Dallas’ homicide victims on the night of Dec. 12 is still unknown. So, too, are the stories of Jesus Rodriguez and Isidro Soriano, the two men found shot to death the next night.

Throughout the year, homicide victims ranged in age from 8 to 88. Dallas police statistics show 111 — or 61% — were Black. Another 31% were Hispanic, and 7% were white. About 82% — or 150 victims — were males. The vast majority were shot.

What can be hard to see in the moment, when a neighborhood first becomes a crime scene, is how the absence of a person can reshape an entire community. The victims were chefs, police officers, welders and crossing guards. Their deaths left empty desks in classrooms, churches without pastors and children without parents.

Their lives were complex, and in some cases, like their deaths, violent. Several of the victims were struggling to navigate new futures after stints in jail or prison. Some weren’t the first in their families to be taken by a bullet.

• Jose Chacon Navarrete, 25, killed only hours into 2024, was an El Salvador native who moved to Dallas in hopes of escaping the gang violence in his home country.
• Cody Ward, 34, beaten to death Jan. 11, was a Dallas Mavericks season ticket-holder who cheered louder than the rest of Section 109.
• Keith Waters, 62, stabbed to death May 21, was a religious worshipper who’d almost made it on the other side of an adulthood rife with addiction, homelessness and crime.
• Tony Mosley, 41, gunned down Nov. 21, was an unabashed mama’s boy who struggled to understand how people could mistreat others.
• Keysi Delgado, 17, fatally shot in the days before 2025, was a beautiful and vibrant teenager who dreamed of becoming a model.

As the investigations unfolded, relatives often expressed frustration to The News about a lack of clarity from police and unanswered calls. They couldn’t grasp how a loss that ripped apart their lives seemed to be only one case of many for the people responsible for bringing them closure.

That sentiment is familiar to Dallas’ homicide detectives.

“It’s not about us,” said Handley, the homicide lieutenant. “It’s about their loved one. They just need to know we care.

“Sometimes, that’s not going to be good enough.”

Back-to-back murders

In the hours after every murder, Castillo, Swanson and other detectives in their squad regroup at police headquarters. Each team member relays what he or she did and jots down a detailed accounting for the lead detective.

“It gives us the opportunity to finally breathe,” Swanson said.

On weeks like this one, that moment — when they can finally halt the hypervigilance and think — goes far, Castillo added.

“We couldn’t remember what day it was, what time it was because they were all running together,” she said. “Sometimes that happens when we have them back to back.”

The homicide unit is made up of 28 detectives who, on average, have at least five years of experience in the department. It’s one of the most coveted positions, police officials said, and requires a candidate who can balance being an autonomous, aggressive case filer with the empathy needed to work with families.

Each detective handles around 10 to 15 cases at any time, Swanson said, which goes beyond murders. Accidental deaths, unexplained suicides — the unit looks into any death that occurs in Dallas and doesn’t appear to be of natural causes. A detective’s workload reaches up to about 70 cases a year, police officials said.

Their squad is one of four that alternates being on call. Every three weeks, their team is back on rotation, tasked with every murder and unexplained death, expected to arise from their beds or couches and leave their families no matter the hour.

They take turns being lead detective. In the two weeks between their on-call week, they investigate their cases, follow up with witnesses, comb through evidence, prepare for trials and try to lighten their caseloads.

Castillo, who has a son in his early 20s, said the hardest part is looking a mother in the eyes and revealing her baby’s gone. They want someone held accountable right then and there. The pressure can be crushing.

“It’s a lot of hurt and pain that you’re carrying,” she said. “Every month you get a case, it’s more baggage that you’re carrying. People’s feelings you’re carrying.”

Sometimes the job follows her home. Castillo’s son is in the age range of many of the victims. She talks to him about making better decisions, about how violent death — homicide — is preventable.

Swanson turns to support from his co-workers and supervisors. On his 30- to 45-minute commute home to Fort Worth, he tries to decompress, to switch out of police mode. A spiritual backing keeps him grounded.

He has a lot of police friends at work, he said, but not many outside of it.

“I want to be normal,” Swanson said. “My wife wants a husband. She doesn’t want Detective Swanson. My kids want dad. They don’t want Detective Swanson.”

Swanson has two young adult sons. At stores, he looks shoppers up and down. He faces the door at dinner, always. It can be hard not to feel jaded, he said, to not feel that the world is made up of people who do bad things to good people.

“I make a conscious effort in the decision not to die in the mud or lay in the mud, but to see the sun — to see the other side of it,” Swanson said. “Because what we see is bad. What we see is gruesome. What we see is awful.”

Before and after

After the scene has been photographed, the bodies whisked away, Castillo and Swanson deliver the news to the victim’s family, splitting their lives into before and after.

“It doesn’t get easy,” Swanson said.

When Castillo arrives at a home, she often savors the last moments of before. She sits outside, says a prayer. And it hits her.

“Their life is never going to be the same,” she said. “And you’re waiting out there, knowing what has already happened.”

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