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Sunday, October 28, 2001
Scary at first sight
A blood-drinking taxi driver, a hulking Harley dude and a guy who hangs from hooks. Here’s a rogue’s gallery that proves appearances can be devilishly deceiving...
Stories by staff writer Dan Parker
Just hangin’ around

David Pellerin/Caller-Times

Richard Nunez hangs from four shark hooks protruding through the skin on his back. He says he gets a spiritual boost from being suspended in the air by hooks.

   A shark hook is several inches of cold, barbed steel shaped to a point so sharp that it’s nearly invisible. Richard Nunez, 28, knows what it feels like to be punctured with one. His friends often pierce the skin on his body with anywhere from two to 12 hooks and then hoist him several feet in the air by wires.
   Dangling from a tree limb or rafters, he sometimes remains suspended for several hours. The skin on his back oozes little blood, but stretches several inches like Silly Putty where the hooks penetrate.
   “If you put your mind and your body through enough traumatic stress and you have the discipline to overcome this, you reach another state of mind,” said Nunez, who works as a body piercer at 3-D Body Art in Corpus Christi. “Every time I come down, I’ve smiled for three weeks afterward.”
   Some might think that a man who puts hooks through his body is perhaps a few jack-o’-lanterns short of a pumpkin patch. But Nunez’s boss, Joy Lawrence, said Nunez is a smart guy, a writer of computer software.
   “Anything he does, he wants to know every aspect of it,” said Lawrence, owner of 3-D Body Art. “He reads books really fast. He’s like a little computer.”
   Among Nunez’s favorite pastimes: Writing poetry, playing bass guitar and reading fairy tales.

   Hellraiser? Hogwash!

Michelle Christenson/Caller-Times

Roger Santoya Jr. looks intimidating as he roars around Coastal Bend highways on his Harley. He’s also a middle-school PTA member.

   Roger Santoya Jr. wears leather from head to toe while roaring down South Padre Island Drive on his 1986 black-and-white Electric Glide Classic Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a machine that has chrome-colored skulls decoratively bolted onto its engine, which he customized to produce a bone-rattling growl.
   “When I go to a mall and get off my bike, people in cars next to me start locking their doors,” said Santoya, who sports a mane of black hair that pours down his back and a beard that swirls down his chest. “They’ll reach all the way to the other side and lock those doors. I just giggle a little bit about it.”
   What the car lockers don’t know is that Santoya is a father of three and has scooped ice cream at PTA fundraisers. He’s been a maintenance worker for the city for nearly 20 years.
   Far from being the stereotypical biker nomad who constantly drinks and fights, Santoya lives in a three-bedroom house in a tree-lined Corpus Christi neighborhood. He drinks no more than six beers each week because he’s watching his diabetes and he can’t remember the last time he was in a fight.
   He’s been married to the same woman, Terri Santoya, for 23 years.
   “He’s a good old guy,” said Terri Santoya. “He’s just a big old teddy bear.”
   One of Santoya’s main joys as a biker: Piloting his machine down a rural highway on a spring day.
   “I’m usually up ahead of the (traffic), and you see so much,” he said. “Just being out on Easter Sunday, you see all these flowers out there, different colors. It’s like waves of nothing but flowers out there.”

   Watch your back

Paul Iverson/Caller-Times

Proctologist Fred Brackett holds a sigmoidoscope, a device that is inserted in the colon to screen for cancer.

   To those squeamish about proctology, the medical equipment in Dr. Fred Brackett’s office at Spohn Towers might look like a little shop of horrors.
   There’s the rigid proctoscope, for example. It is inserted 10 to 12 inches into the lower colon during examinations. Then there is the flexible sigmoidoscope, a viewing instrument that looks like a black rubber hose about a half-inch wide and 24 inches long.
   Sometimes, patients are embarrassed or just plain scared to get an exam, Brackett acknowledges.
   “A number of people will make appointments and cancel them and make them again and cancel them again,” said Brackett. “Finally, they’ll decide to go through with it.”
   Apparantly, he says, some folks would prefer to remain in the dark when it comes to those regions where the sun don’t shine.
   While the prospect of visiting this doctor might be a bit frightening, Brackett is a real lifesaver. His exams can detect polyps, or pre-cancerous growths.

   Dolling up the dead

Paul Iverson/Caller-Times

Funeral home director Manuel N. Cantu Jr.’s work isn’t for the faint of heart, but the behind-the-scenes artistry he performs on a body can ease a family's grief.

   Manuel N. Cantu Jr. was invited to many social gatherings as a Nueces County justice of the peace in the 1970s.
   But that changed after he got out of office and went back to working full-time at his funeral home.
   “I think people over the years have shied away,” Cantu said. “They don’t invite (me) really to their weddings or their parties, because they don’t want to remember about the dead.”
   Cantu, 70, is owner of Cantu Funeral Home. He embalms corpses, dresses bodies and brushes make-up on the cold flesh of the deceased.
   It’s work most people wouldn’t have the stomach for. But Cantu says he’s happy to provide relief for grieving families.
   “You want them to have a lifelike appearance, like they’re asleep and at peace,” Cantu said. “You don’t want to remember the last minute, when they died, and how sick they were. I feel good and honored I can do the work, and the (families) are satisfied...They won’t remember the bad parts.”

   Witchy woman

Paul Iverson/Caller-Times

Linda Roberts, also known as The Witch of Weber, keeps a watchful eye out for speed demons.

   If you’re driving around the south side of Corpus Christi, beware of The Witch of Weber. Her name is Linda Roberts, and her broom is a police car.
   Roberts, a senior officer with the Corpus Christi Police Department, said she got her nickname after a few motorists complained that she wrote a lot of tickets on Weber Road.
   “And that’s why they dubbed me the Witch of Weber,” Roberts said. “I’m just glad I didn’t work the beach at the time.”
   During her 27 years as an officer, Roberts has written thousands of tickets to scofflaws all over Corpus Christi.
   Even her own boss keeps an eye out for her patrol car. Roberts pulled over Capt. Robert MacDonald for speeding five years ago when he was off-duty. She let him off with a warning.
   “After being given a thorough tongue-lashing, I was careful from then on,” MacDonald said.
   Her all-time record is about 1,000 tickets in one month. But Roberts says she’s really a softie at heart, especially when it comes to keeping the streets safe from speeders.
   “You have to love people and care about them,” she said. “I keep my eyes open, I keep driving and I don’t stop.”

   Sucker for love

Michelle Christenson/Caller-Times

John Munoz, a self-described vampire, keeps Halloween decorations in his home year-round.

   John Muñoz is a taxi driver who works only at night. He always wears black. At home, he keeps the shades drawn in a house decorated with fake skulls, candles and miniature coffins. In his bedroom closet are a black cape and top hat.
   There’s a reason for all this. Muñoz insists he’s a vampire.
   He said he first realized it when he was 17 years old, and a friend accidentally cut her hand with a broken light bulb. He felt an urge to taste her blood. She let him do it, and the taste was intoxicating, Muñoz said. He’s had cravings ever since, and he satisfies his urges with people he calls “willing donors” — women who allow him to inflict small cuts on their upper backs, wrists, or inner thighs so he can drink small amounts of their blood. He said the women get a sensual thrill from it. But people should not fear him, he said.
   “I’m not going to jump out of the bushes and attack people or anything,” the soft-spoken 41-year-old said. “I’m not a violent person. I just live a different lifestyle, like Goths or gays. I just prefer to celebrate the night instead of the day.”
   Taxi dispatcher Chris Rosales works alongside Muñoz and likes him.
   “I think he’s a fun, outgoing guy,” Rosales said. “He’s very easy to talk to, very friendly.”
   Muñoz doesn’t seem to have otherworldly powers. He can’t turn into a bat and fly. He gets around in his white 1992 Ford Taurus.
   But when a Caller-Times photographer recently visited Muñoz at his home to take his picture, the photographer’s flash equipment suddenly stopped working.
   Muñoz laughed.
   “You can’t take pictures of a vampire,” he said.

   A gutsy job

David Adame/Caller-Times

Using the tools of his trade, Nueces County Medical Examiner Lloyd White conducts autopsies that might turn the average onlooker's stomach. But White's work is important, determining causes of death and helping prosecutors put murderers behind bars.

   Lloyd White sees dead people. He also cuts open their abdomens and examines their organs and saws open their skulls and pokes around in their brains. As Nueces County Medical Examiner, White does about 250 autopsies each year to determine causes and manners of death. Almost always there are a few corpses lying on gurneys just a few doors down from his office. But that’s where the misconceptions begin.
   “Based on what they’ve seen on TV and movies, people expect things to be very grim,” White said. “But we’re just like any doctor’s office. We’re fortunate in our facility to have kind of a bright, open facility with friendly people.”
   Sometimes White must view bodies that have been mangled in car accidents. And he must handle bodies that are horribly decomposed.
   “What is always on my mind is that all these individuals were created in the image and likeness of God,” White said. “No matter how grungy or grimy they are or how severely decomposed, the way the human body is put together and the way it functions is kind of a miracle beyond human understanding.”
   White has helped bring killers to justice, said Mark Skurka, a prosecutor at the District Attorney’s Office.
   “Dr. White does a job that very few of us could do,” Skurka said. “But he is a tremendous asset to the prosecution of cases... It is a job that few people would relish but one that he is very, very good at.”

   Contact staff writer Dan Parker at 886-3753 or at parkerd@caller.com

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