On the night of June 24, 1993, two teenage girls took a shortcut they had walked before — and stepped into a gang initiation that would become one of the most notorious crimes in Houston's history. Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, were trying to beat an 11:30 p.m. curfew, cutting through an area near White Oak Bayou in northwest Houston. Their path took them across a railroad bridge where six young men had gathered to drink beer and initiate a new member into a self-styled street gang.
The gang called itself the "Black and White Gang," and its leader was Peter Anthony Cantu, born in 1973 and about 20 years old that summer — the oldest of the six. When the initiation ritual, a physical beating of the newest member, was interrupted by the appearance of the two girls, the night turned from a crime in progress into something far worse. One of the members grabbed Elizabeth Pena. She screamed. Jennifer Ertman, by every account, did not run. She tried to help her friend. Against a group of armed young men, there was nothing she could do.
What happened next was driven by a single cold calculation. The gang realized the girls could identify them. According to court testimony, Cantu — acting as leader — ordered the members to kill both girls to eliminate the witnesses. It was this order, more than any other act, that the justice system would later treat as the measure of his guilt. He told the youngest member, 14-year-old Venancio Medellin, to stay behind during the murders because he was, in Cantu's words, "too little to watch."