Courtesy of Jillian Manuel
A makeshift memorial was set up near the site in Portland, Tex., where a couple found Mollie Judith Olgin, 19, and Mary Kristene Chapa, 18, after they were shot last week.
By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com
Texas Rangers have joined the investigation into the shooting of two teenage girls at a South Texas park last weekend that left one of the young women dead and the other severely injured, a state public safety spokesman said Tuesday.
Portland Police had asked the Texas Rangers for help, kiiitv.com reported, and Rangers were at the park on Tuesday looking for clues near where the pair was found.
“The Rangers are assisting in the investigation … but the P.D. (police department) is still the lead,” Tom Vinger, spokesman for Texas Department of Public Safety, told msnbc.com. On their website, the Rangers, formed in 1835, are described as having lead criminal investigative responsibility for major incident crime and unsolved crime or serial crime.
Mollie Judith Olgin, 19, and Mary Kristene Chapa, 18, who were in a same-sex relationship, were found in a grassy area of the park by a couple Saturday morning with gunshot wounds to the head, Portland Police Chief Randy Wright said.
Olgin, originally from nearby Ingleside but recently living in Corpus Christi, died; Chapa, of Sinton, was rushed to an area hospital where she was in stable condition, Wright said Tuesday in a statement.
Wright said police had recovered a bullet casing from a large-caliber gun at the scene, leading investigators to believe the shootings occurred where the pair was found, but they haven’t found the weapon. Two witnesses said they heard what could have been gunshots or firecrackers just before midnight last Friday but did not report it at the time, he said.
Police are investigating the shooting of two teenage girls in a same-sex relationship in a small Texas community along the Gulf of Mexico. KRIS reporter Lindsay Curtis has the story.
A motive had not been established, he said in the statement.
"Information from family and friends indicates that Mollie and Mary were engaged in a same-sex relationship. However, there is no current evidence to indicate the attacks were motivated by that relationship," he said.
Wright told msnbc.com on Monday that: “It appears as if … this was not just a random attack but that’s something that we really have to develop over time.”
Because of her medical condition, Chapa has not been formally interviewed about what happened, he said.
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The park, a nature area with some parts overgrown and no lights, was often frequented by visitors during the day, but not at night. It is located along a bluff overlooking a bay, Wright said, with some homes situated nearby.
“We’re not really sure how they got to the point that they were found,” he said. “It is a scenic overlook with a wooden deck and there is a place at the edge of the deck where you can actually go down a very steep incline into a grassy area that leads down to the shoreline, and that’s where they were found.”
The crime rate is low in Portland, north of Corpus Christi on the Gulf of Mexico, Wright said. The last homicide occurred two years ago.
The couple’s friends and well-wishers placed rainbow ribbons, goodbye messages, flowers and cut-out hearts on Sunday around the site where Olgin and Chapa were found. On Friday, a candlelight vigil and walk will be held for them.
Frank Reyna, a 19-year-old university student, said he grew up with Chapa and met Olgin his sophomore year of high school. He described Chapa as an athlete who played softball, and said Olgin, a student at a nearby university, was focused on academics but also was a big joker. He last saw them together at a local coffee shop in May, which was the first time he saw them out as a couple.
“It’s something that I think all of us are going to carry with us for a while,” Reyna told msnbc.com. “It’s going to take a while to get past this, the idea that there is somebody still out there that did this to these two amazing, beautiful people, and that they’re walking free right now.”
Courtesy of Jillian Manuel
Rainbow ribbons, messages, flowers and cut-out hearts were left near the site in Portland, Tex., where a couple found Mollie Judith Olgin, 19, and Mary Kristene Chapa, 18, after they were shot.
Friends said the pair had been together since mid-February.
The couple’s relationship “was a readily accepted thing,” Reyna added, and was not what their friends focused on.
“We focused on their personalities and how they got along with everybody else … their kindheartedness and their ability to just make other people smile and make each other smile,” he said. “We didn’t care … what they were, it’s who they were.”
Jillian Manuel, 20, who used to work with Olgin, said it was hard to return to the park on the weekend knowing what had happened there. She went to help create the makeshift memorial, where friends shared stories and tears, and to check the scene, where she recalled the difficulty of watching Olgin’s car get towed.
“We’re … hoping to kind of just remember Molly, remember her and just share our memories,” Manuel said of their planned vigil. “And then … send off prayers for Christine and just celebrate them.”
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