Hit Happens

At about 11 o'clock on a chilly November night in 1998, a black Lexus sped to the emergency doors of Overland Park's Menorah Medical Center and lurched to a stop. The driver's door opened, and a distraught, pregnant woman emerged clutching two yapping teacup Yorkies to her enormous belly.

"Call the FBI! Call the DEA!" she screamed as a Colombian teenager in a blood-spattered T-shirt climbed from the back seat and ran into the hospital, exclaiming in heavily accented English that a man outside had been shot in the head. Nurses and a doctor sprinted out and peered into the car, where they found a dead man sprawled across the back seat. Duct tape covered the man's eyes and bound his arms and legs. Blood soaked his clothes. The doctor felt for a pulse and examined the bullet hole in the man's head.

The boy who had summoned help, Andres Borja-Molina, shook and sobbed as he muttered vengeful plans. Hours earlier, four men had left him for dead after they'd killed this man, his uncle. Borja-Molina didn't want to talk to police, but Leawood and Overland Park officers soon arrived. Hysterical, Borja-Molina pulled a hospital security guard aside and told him to be ready to start shooting if he saw a pearl-colored Lexus. He also told police to watch for that car, particularly its driver, a Houston-based drug trafficker who had ordered that night's bloody mayhem.

"Hey," Borja-Molina said to police, pointing to an eerily similar Lexus in the parking lot. "It looks a lot like that one." But even the paranoid Borja-Molina failed to notice Edwin Hinestroza at the wheel. Purely by chance, the drug lord, a sometime Johnson County resident, had arranged to meet his girlfriend, a twentyish stripper from Houston, at the hospital, which was near her apartment.

As Hinestroza drove out of the parking lot and away to freedom with his girlfriend, police learned that the pregnant woman with the terriers was the dead man's wife. She had known him only by his alias, Julian Colon. The story she'd heard in the car on the way to the hospital had left her in a state of disbelief. She had known nothing about her husband's position in the dangerous world of Colombian narcotics trafficking. He hadn't even told her that he was Colombian.

Throughout their short courtship and marriage, Julian Colon had managed to keep his wife, Savanah, believing an outrageous lie: that he was a professional soccer player for the Kansas City Wizards. He would proudly show her friends and coworkers a "Wizzards" identification card with his photo on it when they socialized in restaurants and bars; she never caught the misspelling. He had a professional-quality Wizards uniform, and after he feigned a knee injury for the first month of their marriage, he would get up at 6:30 each morning, slip into his jersey and tell her he was going to team practice. He encouraged her to offer free tickets to her coworkers. He probably bought the tickets from a Ticketmaster outlet, she later surmised. Savanah even had a Wizards plate on her car.

A self-described straight arrow, Savanah Colon had been an army nurse in Desert Storm, and in Overland Park worked twelve-hour days as a hairdresser at Mario Tricoci Salon and Day Spa. She claimed she would never have put up with any illegitimate or illegal activity on her husband's part. "If I would have known, he wouldn't have been [a drug dealer] anymore," she later said adamantly. She never guessed that her 25-year-old husband, who wore his long, black hair down to his waist, had been a stripper in Houston or that much of his family was involved in the drug trade.

Colon seemed like a warm, exuberant and kind man when he came to Savanah's salon to get his hair trimmed. He won over the serious, all-business 28-year-old Savanah with his zest for life. "He was always full of surprises," she later said.

The couple had a "fairy-tale" courtship and soon got engaged. One Saturday evening, Colon surprised his fiancée by picking her up from work. In the back of the car sat luggage he had brought for both of them -- he had even packed her favorite jeans. She asked where they were going, but he wouldn't say. He drove up I-29 to Kansas City International airport, where they boarded a plane to Las Vegas. They slept in a nice hotel. They spent a blissful Sunday shopping for her wedding dress and his suit. Then they browsed the Strip's chapels until they found their ideal nuptial setting. It was the happiest day of Savanah's life, and although she would work long hours after the couple returned to Kansas, that happiness faded little over the ensuing weeks.

"He was unlike any man I ever met in my life," Savanah said later in court. "He cleaned the house, kept the house clean, massaged my stinky feet when I would come home from work every single day no matter what.... We went bike riding together every Sunday. We dressed up for Halloween together. He dressed the dogs up and surprised me.... He was just wonderful in every aspect. The first time he met my mom he brought her roses and gifts and was so nervous to meet her and my stepdad.... I just never met anybody like that. And every time somebody at work asked, 'How is married life?' I would tell them, 'Somebody pinch me; this is too good to be true.' I literally lived in a fairy tale. Life is not like that. And now I guess I see why."