Victim of Texas inmate set for execution was loving schoolteacher, pillar of her community

At 85 years old, Escolastica Harrison was enjoying her retirement years following decades of juggling her job as a schoolteacher and managing a trailer park that served as a "stepping stone" for struggling residents in the south Texas border city of Brownsville.

Though she still managed the trailer park, she had slowed down some in a good way, finding more time to water the backyard plants she loved so much or catch up over the phone with a beloved nephew.

Instead of being allowed to live out the rest of her years in peace, Harrison was brutally murdered in her own home the night of Sept. 5, 1998. One of the men convicted in the crime, Ruben Gutierrez, is set to be executed by lethal injection in the crime in Texas on Tuesday.

"Everybody loved her,” Alex Hernandez, her nephew and godson, told USA TODAY last week. "She was a real person. She was a giver. She gave back to the community, and she cared."

As Gutierrez's execution nears, USA TODAY is looking back at the crime and who Harrison was.

Who was Escolastica Harrison?

For Hernandez, Harrison will always been known as Aunt Peco, a pillar of the community and someone who not only cared about all of the students she taught but wanted to make sure they succeeded.

Harrison taught third grade at Cromack Elementary, which was in one of the poorest parts of Brownsville at the time, with most of the students being children of migrant workers.

It was very important to Harrison, a native Spanish speaker herself, to make enunciation a priority in her classroom. 

“She’s like, ‘They need to learn English and they need to learn it the right way. I don’t want them to speak any slang or anything like that,'" Hernandez recalled about Harrison. "She was like a drill sergeant, ingrained it in them because they needed to know.  She wanted to help. It wasn’t because she was mean, she wanted to make that they had the tools they needed to get by in this world."

Students weren’t the only group to benefit from Harrison’s firm yet loving hand. 

The trailer park, which she owned with husband Robert Harrison before his death in 1991, was a “stepping stone” for people, particularly immigrants from Mexico who were trying to establish themselves. 

Harrison cared about her tenants, offering advice, fixing things and occasionally offering diapers to help families in need, Hernandez said. “All of her tenants loved her,” even if she did have scold them every once in a while," he said.

At home, she made summers so much fun for Hernandez and his younger brother.

“She was like, ‘When we get home … You wanna go fishing?’ She had a resaca, you know, a pond  in the back," he said. "She’d tell me, ‘Go fishing. I’m going to call your cousin Robbie and we’re going to make sandwiches. Y’all are going to have fun and play out there.’ That's the kind of person she was."

What happened to Escolastica Harrison

By 1998 when Harrison was 85, one of her nephews, Avel Cuellar, was living with her and helping around the house. A local man named Ruben Gutierrez was a friend of Cuellar's and was frequently at Harrison's home socializing and drinking. Gutierrez befriended Harrison and would run errands for her, eventually learning that she kept a lot of cash in her home because she didn't trust banks, according to court records.

On Sept. 5, 1998, Gutierrez and two other men − Rene and Pedro Garcia − went to Harrison's home to rob her. The accounts of what happened in her home vary, with Gutierrez arguing that he waited outside and had no idea things would get violent.

Regardless, Harrison ended up “face down in a pool of blood” after having been beaten and stabbed, court records say. Though Gutierrez thought Harrison had $600,000 in the home, the men made away with at least $56,000.

A jury found Gutierrez guilty of capital murder in 1999 and sentenced him to death one month later. His execution has previously been set six times and then postponed over mostly clerical errors − a process that amounts to torture, his attorney argues in a petition for clemency that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied on Friday.

If the execution proceeds, Gutierrez would be the third inmate put to death in the state this year and the 10th in the nation.

At the time of her death, Harrison was still managing the trailer park full time and was still adept at "taking care of business," Hernandez said.

Hernandez to attend execution

Hernandez still remembers the night a cousin called to break the news, telling him Cuellar had found Harrison's body in the trailer.

“And I just cried. I just remember crying,” Hernandez said.

No one took Harrison's murder harder than her sister and Hernandez's mother, Estela Cuellar Perez, who was at the trailer park to help run operations every day after that because that’s what Harrison would have wanted.  The family eventually sold the trailer park, but Cuellar Perez couldn’t stop thinking about her sister, about what she had lost. 

“I remember on her deathbed, like the day before she died, telling me to make sure (Gutierrez) gets executed,” Hernandez said. 

He plans to do just that for his mom. Hernandez is set to be among the witnesses who watches as Gutierrez is put to death Tuesday.