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This story is about the interests of justice in Maricopa County, about the kind of man they protect, and the kind of man they don’t. If I were a country balladeer, I’d call this tale “The Pistol Whippin’ Rancher From Cave Creek.” That would be Tom Rose, 53, an ex-cop from Kansas who likes to talk about the time he shot a man in the line of duty.
That was many years ago, back when Rose had a gun and a badge. Now he has a gun and a ranch — Ponda Rose’s Ranch, a well-kept, three-acre spread on Lone Mountain Road. It was there, on February 5, 1999, that Tom Rose began to put the interests of justice to the test. That was the day he pistol-whipped and tied up a ranch hand named Adan Salcido, a “damned Mexican sexual fetishist,” says Rose, who dared lay hands on Rose’s wife and got what was coming to him.
Salcido, 27, had worked as a horse wrangler on Rose’s ranch for about a month when it happened, and it happened like this (unless noted otherwise, all information from here forward is taken directly from investigative reports of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office):
It was half past noon. Salcido was eating his lunch in a golf cart parked next to the Ponda Rose’s guest house when he saw Helen Rose, Tom’s wife of 25 years, walking toward the entrance to the guest house, carrying a bottle of wine (the wine was for her aunt and uncle, who were arriving later that day to spend their 50th wedding anniversary on the ranch). Salcido told investigators that he had thought for some time that Mrs. Rose was interested in him romantically, and got the wrong idea from the bottle of wine.
In any case, Salcido asked Mrs. Rose if he could accompany her inside the guest house. She said yes, unlocked the door, and went inside, with Salcido behind her.
Exactly what happened inside the guest house is known only to Adan Salcido and Helen Rose. What we know is this: A short time later — maybe a minute — Helen Rose ran out of the guest house in a fright and locked herself inside the ranch’s office, 100 feet away. Salcido was a few steps behind her, yelling, in fractured English, “I sorry. Please, don’t tell anyone!”
But Mrs. Rose did tell anyone, and probably just the anyone Salcido didn’t want her to tell: Mr. Rose, who was southbound on Scottsdale Road near the Thunderbird Road intersection when his wife called him on his mobile phone. She was crying, her husband later told investigators, and kept saying, “Adan tried to get me inside the guest house.”
At this point, it’s important to note what ex-cop Tom Rose did not do. He did not tell his wife to hang up and call the police. He did not switch lines and call the police himself. Instead, he wheeled his truck around and drove like hell back to his ranch, 20 miles to the north.
In the meantime, Salcido knocked on the window of the office and pleaded through the glass, “I sorry. I quit, I go back to Mexico.”
An immediate departure would have been a smart move on a day when Salcido had already made a stupid one, because if you’re in a closed space with another man’s wife, or any woman, and she flees that space crying and afraid, chances are you’ve made a stupid move, illegal or not.
Instead of leaving, though, he just hung around outside the office, hoping Helen Rose would come out so he could smooth things over.
Salcido’s second stupid move of the day nearly got him killed. And now, a year later, may put him in prison.
There are so many conflicting versions of what happened when Tom Rose arrived at the ranch, most of them told by Tom Rose, that I’m going to leap ahead to the neutral observations of Detective Matt Simon of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, the first officer to arrive on the scene after Helen Rose called 911 at 1:36 p.m., nearly an hour after she ran out of the guest house.
According to Simon’s report, as soon as he pulled into the Ponda Rose’s driveway, he was met by Tom Rose, who told the deputy a ranch hand had just tried to rape his wife. Rose led Simon to the garage, where the deputy found Salcido lying on the floor, his hands and feet bound with plastic cables, bleeding from a gash in the back of his head.
Deputy Simon asked Tom Rose how the man on the floor had gotten his head busted. Rose told him he and Salcido had gotten into a fight, and Salcido had hit his head on the floor.
“He’s lucky he didn’t get shot,” Rose told the deputy.
Naturally, Simon asked Rose if a gun had been involved. Curiously, Rose said no. He said he was a retired police officer, but he no longer owned a gun.
Detective Simon untied Salcido, handcuffed him, and locked Salcido in the back of his patrol car.
About this time — 2 p.m. — Deputy K.C. Wenzel arrived at the ranch to relieve Simon, who transported Salcido to the sheriff’s department’s Cave Creek substation.
Wenzel started asking questions.
First he talked to Helen Rose, who was still inside the ranch’s office, a few feet from where Salcido had lain, tied up and bleeding.
Wenzel began by asking Mrs. Rose if she was injured or needed medical attention. According to his report, she told him she did not. Wenzel noted that she had no visible injuries. Then he asked her to explain, essentially, what the hell had just happened.
Here’s Helen Rose’s story, as recorded by Deputy Wenzel, picking up where she passes Salcido eating his lunch in the golf cart:
“Helen said that she asked Adan, who she and her husband called ‘Don,’ to move some horses from one corral to another after he finished his lunch. Don asked her if she would show him the living area [inside the guest house]. She said yes. Helen stated that she unlocked the door and stepped inside, followed by Don.
“Once inside the room, Don commented on the ‘nice bed’ to the left of the entrance door. Don was standing behind her, and told her that she had dirt on the back of her shirt, and began to wipe it off with his hands. Helen said that she did not think about it at the time because working on the ranch you can get dirty.
“Don then placed his left hand on her left forearm, and his right hand on her lower back at the top of her pants and said to her, ‘You’re beautiful. Do you want me?’ She then became frightened, said, ‘No,’ and pulled away from Don and ran back to the office inside the garage.
“I asked Helen if Don had threatened or hurt her in any way, and she said, ‘No.'”
Next, Deputy Wenzel questioned Tom Rose.
“Upon his arrival at home, Tom said he found Don outside of the garage. He approached Don and said, ‘What are you doing putting your fucking hands on my wife?’ Tom said that as he came close to Don, Don said, ‘I leave. I go to Mexico,’ then struck him [Tom] with his closed right fist. They then began to wrestle just outside the door to the garage. Tom said an employee named Steven came out of the garage to help him control Don, and at some point they fell down and Don struck his head, causing the head injury.”
Deputy Wenzel also asked Tom Rose if any weapons were involved. Again, Rose said no.
Wenzel turned his attention to ranch hand Steven Atchinson, who told Wenzel that at about 1:30 p.m., he was entering the garage when he saw Tom Rose “forcibly escorting” Adan into the garage. Tom told Atchinson that Don had “attacked” his wife and he [Tom] needed help. Atchinson said he helped Tom wrestle Salcido to the ground and tie him up. Steven also said no weapons had been used by anyone.
Deputy Wenzel had initially questioned Tom and Helen Rose separately. Now he brought them together and asked if they wanted to press charges against Salcido. According to his report, Tom said yes, but Helen said no, then the couple argued until Tom convinced his wife to file a complaint against Salcido, in the interests of justice.
Back at the Cave Creek cop shop, Adan Salcido’s story about what happened inside the guest house matched Helen Rose’s almost perfectly, right down to brushing the dirt off her back and saying, “You are beautiful. Do you want me?”
Once Salcido got into what happened when rancher Rose got home, though, the plot thickened quicker than the blood still oozing from Salcido’s head. From Wenzel’s report:
“Adan said he was standing at the corner of the garage when Tom approached him. Adan said that Tom had a gun in his right hand and pointed it at his head from a few feet away. Adan said he tried to apologize to Tom, and told him he would quit and go to Mexico. Tom then began to curse him and pushed the gun against the left side of his throat. Tom said, ‘Get in the garage or I’ll kill you.’ Tom then forced him into the garage and struck him on the back of the head with the gun, causing his injury. Tom and Steven then forced him to the ground and tied him up.”
Salcido told Wenzel he was in the country illegally. The deputy asked him if he wanted to contact the Mexican embassy. Salcido said no. Salcido was then taken to Madison Street Jail and booked on two misdemeanor counts; one count for putting his hands on Helen Rose, which he admitted, and one count for punching Tom Rose, which he denied.
Salcido was released a few hours later on $274 bail.
At 10:15 that night, Wenzel was doing paperwork at the Cave Creek station when Tom Rose called him, furious that Salcido had been released. Rose demanded that Salcido be re-arrested and charged with attempted rape, a felony.
Wenzel’s response: “I tried to explain that assault was all we could charge Adan with given the facts we had. I then asked Tom if he had used a handgun when confronting Adan and if he struck him on the head with the gun. He answered, ‘Of course I did. What would you have done?'”
Wrong answer, cowboy.
Wenzel told Rose to take his story from the top, and this time to include the part about the gun:
“Tom said that upon his arrival home, he blocked the driveway with his truck so Adan could not drive away. He then entered his office and took the gun from a drawer. He said that he feared for the safety of his wife and daughters. Tom said that he found Adan outside of the garage and asked him what he had done to his wife, and pointed the gun at Adan for self-protection. Tom said Adan then tried to hit him with his fist, so Tom hit Adan in the head with the gun. Tom then tried to restrain Adan and bring him into the garage. Steven came and helped him.
“I asked Tom why, if he feared for the safety of his family, he did not call the police prior to his arrival home. Tom told me he did not like the questions I was asking. . . . I asked him if he wanted to speak to someone else. Tom said ‘Yes . . .’ I turned the phone over to Deputy Bryant, who is familiar with the case.”
Tom Rose was suffering from a failure to communicate. He didn’t understand that he was now a criminal suspect as well as a victim. As soon as he was on the phone with Bryant, he called Deputy Wenzel a jerk. Bryant wrote of their encounter:
“I told Tom there was no need to call the other Deputy names, that the Deputy was only trying to find out what happened because Adan had made some allegations about Tom and he had initially neglected to tell us about the gun. I asked him why he not only neglected to tell us about the gun, but told us no weapons were involved. Tom ignored the question.”
Instead, Rose again demanded to know why Salcido hadn’t been charged with a felony.
“I explained that according to his wife, Adan had only put his arm around her and told her that she was beautiful and asked if she wanted him,” Bryant wrote. “He didn’t try to force himself on her or trap her in the guest house. I reminded him he had to convince his wife to prosecute because she initially didn’t want anything done.”
Bryant asked Rose — again — why he hadn’t told investigators about the gun.
“He said, ‘Well, I’m telling you now.'”
Fine, said Bryant, let’s hear the story one more time. And one more time, Rose changed his story. He was getting to be a one-man production of Gunsmoke meets Rashomon.
Here’s take three:
“Upon arrival Tom said he blocked the main entrance to the property so Adan couldn’t leave, then got his gun from the desk drawer and put it in his jacket pocket. He then went looking for Adan and said ‘Hi’ to an employee working on a motorhome. He then saw Adan and called for him to come over. Once they were face to face, Tom said Adan told him he was sorry and would go back to Mexico. Tom said he then took the gun from his pocket and told Adan he wasn’t going anywhere, and directed him into the garage. Adan then struck Tom with a closed right fist, causing Tom’s coffee to spill on the front of his shirt.”
Did he say coffee?
“Rose told me he was holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his left hand.”
Okay, let’s get this straight: Rose gets home, blocks the driveway, grabs the gun, then pours himself a cup of coffee?
Bryant: “At this point, Tom became the focus of our investigation.”
The deputy read Rose his Miranda rights over the telephone. Rose asked the deputy if he was kidding. Bryant said no. Rose said he didn’t think it was against the law to protect his family on his own property.
“I again asked Tom why he felt that he needed the gun. Tom said that Adan had a weird look in his eyes and he didn’t want to take any chances.”
Wait a second. In an earlier account, Rose had said he got the gun out of his office before he saw Adan.
“Tom also said that he was trained to always be prepared, that he had done this for a long time as a police officer. Tom said that he couldn’t believe how this had all turned around. He said it was as bad as when he was a cop and shot somebody. They took his gun and did an internal investigation.”
Bryant told Rose that he and Wenzel would come by the next day to seize the gun. End of conversation.
The following afternoon, Bryant and Wenzel arrived at Ponda Rose’s to find a most contrite Tom Rose. According to their reports, the rancher apologized for his attitude at length, and kept saying he wished it hadn’t come to this, because he’s a prominent man in the community who does a lot of charity work, and didn’t want any criminal charges to stain his reputation.
The deputies pressed Rose to hand over the gun. Rose said he would as soon as he spoke with his attorney, former Maricopa County prosecutor Jim Cleary, whom Rose was supposed to call in a few minutes.
Deputy Bryant took the opportunity to ask Rose — for the third time — why, if he was so afraid for his family’s safety, he had not called the police before making the 15- to 20-minute drive to Ponda Rose’s from Scottsdale and Thunderbird.
Rose told Bryant he thought the county sheriff’s force was so “scattered out” in Cave Creek, it would take too long to get there. (MCSO dispatch records show Deputy Simon arrived on the scene six minutes after Helen Rose called 911.)
Rose told Bryant and Wenzel he wished “it would all just go away.” Wenzel asked what he meant.
“He said, ‘Well, I wish we didn’t have to do all of this. This guy is an illegal. He’s gonna run off back to Mexico, anyway.’ I [Wenzel] told him that illegal or not, Adan still has rights. Then I asked him why he would approach someone he was so afraid of with a gun in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. He didn’t answer. Instead, he began to tell me that his wife was so upset he had spent about a half hour trying to get her to come out from under the desk in the office. He said that she had crawled up into a ball with her fingers in her mouth. She did this because she was upset that Adan had been released.”
Then Rose called his lawyer, who asked to speak with one of the deputies. Cleary wanted to know if the sheriff’s office was going to submit charges against Rose. Wenzel said yes. Then Cleary asked to speak to his client.
After a brief conversation, Rose hung up, then gave the deputies a blue cardboard box containing an unloaded Lorcin .380 semiautomatic, a notoriously unreliable handgun available in many pawnshops for about $100. The deputies gave Rose a receipt for the gun and left.
Unlike Salcido, Rose was not arrested, handcuffed, taken to jail, booked or made to post bail.
Not then, not ever.
In the interests of justice, though, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office asked that the County Attorney’s Office charge Tom Rose thusly: one count of misdemeanor assault (the same charge Salcido had been locked up for the previous day); one count of aggravated assault, a felony, for pistol-whipping Salcido; and one count of kidnapping, another felony, for tying up Salcido in the garage.
Now the case was in the hands of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, which basically had four options: prosecute Tom Rose but not Adan Salcido, prosecute Adan Salcido but not Tom Rose, prosecute them both, or prosecute neither.
The county attorney’s decision: Adan Salcido would be charged with assaulting Helen Rose. Tom Rose would be charged with nothing.
“No reasonable likelihood of conviction,” decided county prosecutor Cindy Winters, who released Rose from criminal liability.
Winters could probably envision how Rose’s lawyer, a former county prosecutor himself, remember, would play the defense cards in court: Ex-cop detains sexual assault suspect. Suspect injured when he tries to escape. Ex-cop ties up suspect until the proper authorities arrive.
There are a few problems with that defense: the fact that Tom Rose didn’t call the police from his cell phone; the fact that Helen Rose didn’t call the cops until after Salcido was tied up and bleeding; the fact that as an ex-cop, Rose should have known how to take down an unarmed suspect without using a gun; and the fact that Salcido says he never took a swing at Rose.
But then, who’s a jury going to believe — the white rancher, or the illegal alien ranch hand?
Meanwhile, the wheels of justice began to grind Adan Salcido through the court system.
Too poor to hire his own lawyer, he was assigned a young public defender, Jeffery Mehrens. The County Attorney’s Office gave the case to a rookie prosecutor with the ironic name of Andrew Clemency.
Trial was set for October 25, 1999.
On September 24, Mehrens began to repeatedly e-mail Clemency, requesting pretrial interviews with Tom and Helen Rose, whom he planned to call as hostile defense witnesses. Salcido’s public defender received no reply until October 13, when Mehrens e-mailed Clemency the following:
“We’re set for trial on this baby on 10-25. I have yet to get any interviews w/the State’s witnesses. Actually, I haven’t received any discovery at all. Let’s get it in gear.”
Clemency e-mailed back a few hours later. He apologized, saying he hadn’t known if his office was actually going to prosecute Salcido, and that he’d been out of town at a seminar. He suggested Mehrens file a motion to delay the trial to give Mehrens more time to prepare.
“Also,” Clemency wrote, “I want someone further up the food chain to review this case.”
One week later, on October 20, Mehrens e-mailed Clemency again: “Any news from the muckety-muckys on whether this is gonna be dismissed?”
Clemency’s response: “I have marching orders to put this trial on.”
Mehrens quickly filed a motion to delay Salcido’s trial until December 2. This motion was granted.
Behind the scenes, Tom Rose was on the warpath. He wanted the charges against Salcido upgraded from misdemeanor assault to attempted sexual assault, a felony. County Attorney’s Office spokesman Bill FitzGerald describes the conversations between his office and Tom Rose as “heated and repeated.”
The December 2 trial date arrived.
The case was to be heard in the courtroom of Jacqueline McVey, a justice of the peace of Northeast Justice Court. I was there that day. So was Rose. I didn’t talk to him then, but I saw him corner a county prosecutor outside McVey’s courtroom, growling about how this damned Mexican still wasn’t charged with a felony. This prosecutor quickly ushered Rose and his wife into a private room. Twenty minutes later, this prosecutor emerged, only to be cornered by Salcido’s public defender, who told him he couldn’t believe this trial was going forward.
“Hey,” the prosecutor told Mehrens. “They file shit I don’t want filed, they don’t file shit I do. What can I say? I’m not in charge.”
Salcido hadn’t fled to Mexico. He was there that day, too, but one of the deputies Mehrens planned to call as a witness was missing in action.
Mehrens asked Justice McVey for another continuance. She set a third trial date: January 27, 2000.
Before that day arrived, though, the case took another twist — a potentially devastating one for Adan Salcido:
Helen Rose changed her story about what happened inside the guest house. Now she told prosecutors that not only had Adan Salcido put his hands on her, he had also tried to pin her to the bed with such force his fingers left bruises on her arms. She said fortunately she was able to break his grip and escape, even though Salcido tried to block her from leaving the room.
Adan Salcido is 5’10”, 175 pounds. Helen Rose is 5’5″, 115. If I were on a jury, I’d have to ask myself how a petite, 48-year-old woman was able to fight off a muscular, 27-year-old man with a 60-pound weight advantage.
I’d like to hear Helen Rose’s side of the story, but her husband won’t let me talk to her. She’s a victim of a sexual crime, he says, and victims of sexual crimes shouldn’t have to talk to journalists.
But I reached Tom Rose on his mobile phone last week, and he talked to me plenty.
As to why his wife waited so long to come forward with the truth: “Well, she’s a little Italian gal, and a good Christian woman, and she felt dirty and wrong about it. She was traumatized, and [the deputies] didn’t take enough time to interview the right way.”
As for all the discrepancies in his stories, as recorded in the MCSO investigative reports, Rose said the deputies wrote it down wrong. “Let’s face it,” he said. “These boys are qualified to sit in the shade and write you a ticket for doin’ 45 in a 35, but that’s about it.”
As to the gun: It wasn’t even loaded, and he never pointed it at Salcido.
“I had stuck it in my belt, hoping he would see it and wouldn’t try anything, but he came at me with a right hook and then dove at me and the fight was on,” Rose said. “So I took it out and hit him in the head with the butt… but I didn’t have it loaded because I was afraid he’d get it away from me and shoot me.”
As to the felony charges against him submitted by the sheriff’s office: “They were just trying to jack with me because I bucked their system and questioned their abilities.”
During our interview, Rose spoke at length about how whenever a man tries to defend himself or his family, the system tries to bring him down, like the time when he was a homicide detective in Kansas City, and blew a hole in a man in self-defense and they took away his gun and badge.
I asked Rose if that was Kansas City, Kansas, or Kansas City, Missouri, and when and why the shooting happened. He wouldn’t say.
Turns out it was Kansas City, Kansas, where Rose joined the municipal police force in 1968, then retired in 1974 at the rank of sergeant. A spokesman for the department confirmed that Rose had been involved in a shooting, but refused to release any details or any portion of the department’s internal investigation. I filed a public information request, which was still pending when this article went to press.
Finally, Rose told me that Salcido and “a bunch of other damned Mexicans” have taken to driving by his ranch at all hours.
“They’re trying to intimidate me, but I’m not backing down from this thing one bit. . . . This guy, he deserves to go to jail. He’s not even a citizen of this country, and now here he is, some damned Mexican sexual fetishist, he’s out on the streets, putting all kinds of women and children in danger.
“Well, I tell you what: I’m going to beg and raise hell until justice is done.”
On January 25, two days before Salcido was to go on trial for two counts of misdemeanor assault, the County Attorney’s Office filed a motion to dismiss the charges “in the interests of justice.”
The motion, filed by another young prosecutor, Jason Johannes, notes that “both victims were notified and were ok with dismissal without prejudice.”
This is not good news for Adan Salcido.
The legalese translation of “without prejudice” means the County Attorney’s Office can re-file the same charges against Salcido, or file new, more serious charges, based on Helen Rose’s new version of events.
Tom Rose told me he and his wife agreed to the dismissal of the misdemeanor charges only because the County Attorney’s Office promised Salcido would be charged with a felony.
FitzGerald, the county attorney’s spokesman, is more circumspect in his comments: “We dismissed the case because new information has been alleged by the victim which must be investigated prior to a new charging decision.”
Through his attorney, Salcido denied trying to force himself on Helen Rose or driving by the Roses’ ranch to intimidate them. Mehrens, his public defender, declined to comment on the case except to say, “We’re shocked the County Attorney’s Office is even considering more serious charges against my client.”
The cruel joke on Salcido is that if any of his initial trial dates had gone through, and he was convicted of misdemeanor assault, at worst he was looking at a short stint in jail and deportation to Mexico.
Now he could go to state prison for a minimum of two and a half years.
From Salcido’s perspective, then, “The Pistol Whippin’ Rancher From Cave Creek” acquires more the flavor of a borderlands corrido, a Mexican folk ballad about a hard-luck case, lovestruck, lonely and far from home, who makes a clumsy play for the wife of a prideful man of influence, and winds up with his freedom hanging by a whim. Title it “Estas bella. ¿Me deseas?“
“You are beautiful. Do you want me?”
And the question becomes: Did a simple “No” suffice?
If Salcido goes to trial, I’ll be there to hear the jury’s answer. In the interests of justice.
Contact David Holthouse at his online address: david.holthouse@newtimes.com
