Counselor Jimmy Owen, who has his client’s permission to talk about the story, said there’s a process for dealing with trauma.
Four men were convicted of assault, robbery, kidnapping and hate crimes that began with a Grindr contact; now one of the victims tells his story
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com
Four men have been given sentences ranging from 11 to 23 years for luring men they met on Grindr to an apartment and assaulting, robbing and kidnapping them. Only one of the victims testified in the sentencing phase of the federal trials. This week that man told his story to Dallas Voice.
For his own safety, the man has asked that neither his name nor his photo be used. He will be identified here as he was in court: Victim No. 6.
Victim No. 6 had been talking for several days on Grindr to a man who identified himself as Cezar and said he was in his early 20s. The victim had recently moved to Dallas after losing his house to Hurricane Harvey and was staying with his sister. He had also just lost a close relative. Cezar was sympathetic and consoling.
“I felt safe,” Victim No. 6 said.
The two men arranged to meet at a restaurant the evening of Friday, Dec. 12, 2017. But when Victim No. 6 got to the restaurant, Cezar texted him, saying that he was having car trouble and asking Victim No. 6 to pick him up.
But when Victim No. 6 arrived at the apartment to meet Cezar, a young man came to the car and said he was having trouble finding his keys and asked Victim No. 6 to come inside.
Victim No. 6 told the young man he thought was Cezar he was concerned that his car would be towed, since so many apartment complexes are very strict about parking. So he didn’t want to leave his car without a parking pass. Cezar went inside and returned with what he said was a pass. But Victim No. 6 realized it was only a blank piece of paper that had been folded.
That’s when he knew something was wrong, Victim No. 6 recalled, and he sent his sister a quick SOS text including the address.
The man claiming to be Cezar “asked me to come in and relax,” Victim No. 6 said. But when he entered, someone who was hiding behind the door hit him from behind, knocking him out. That man, who Victim No. 6 later learned was named Daryl Henry, also knocked out some of his teeth and bruised some of his ribs by kicking him. When he woke up, Cezar, whose real name is Daniel Jenkins, had taken his phone and was demanding the victim’s PINs for his debit cards.
“I was told if I didn’t cooperate, I would end up like the guy before me,” Victim No. 6 said, adding that Jenkins was implying “the guy before him” was dead in the back bedroom.
So Victim No. 6 complied. And then a third man, Pablo Ceniceros-Deleon, wrote down the PINs, took the victim’s keys and drove his car to a nearby ATM and took $1,200 out of the victim’s accounts.
Jenkins and Henry meanwhile dragged Victim No. 6 into the front bedroom where there were two men lying face down on the floor and a third was in the closet. A man later identified as Michael Atkinson was there, carrying a sawed-off shotgun and holding the victims hostage.
“What I didn’t know at the time was someone had escaped on Wednesday,” Victim No. 6 said.
That person, it turned out, had tricked the captors into believing that he didn’t have PINs for his credit cards but that if they took him to their home, he would write them a check. One of the captors drove the man to his home where the victim managed to get inside his house and lock the kidnapper out.
That victim called 911 and told police the apartment number where he had been held but could give only an approximate location. He didn’t have the exact address but was able to tell police it was a maroon-colored complex. That information narrowed it down to two complexes, and Dallas SWAT had both locations under surveillance, watching the comings and goings of the residents.
Victim No. 6 wasn’t the last person to show up: About an hour after he was taken hostage, he heard the door open again and heard Henry knock out the new arrival. After the new victim came to, Victim No. 6 said, he could hear the man pleading for his life before Henry and Jenkins dragged him into the bedroom.
Then Ceniceros-Deleon left again for the ATM. Police followed and arrested him as he stole money.
Around 3 a.m., Victim No. 6 recalled, everything suddenly went quiet. Then he heard glass breaking, followed by a flash of what he described as the brightest light he’d ever seen as someone was yelling, “SWAT!”
The five captives were freed, but the captors had escaped.
The five victims were taken to the police station to give their statements and look at a photo line-up. Victim No. 6 said he was surprised his car was at the station but was told it was considered a crime scene. When he got the car back later, he said, it was covered in black dust from fingerprinting that proved Ceniceros-Deleon had stolen the car.
Victim No. 6 went through the pictures, but he couldn’t identify anyone he saw — until he got to the last photo. He was certain that man, identified as Daniel Jenkins, was the person who had lured him to the apartment through Grindr.
Ceniceros-Deleon, the first of the captors arrested, bonded out of jail and immediately disappeared, presumably to Mexico, Victim No. 6 said.
Several months later, Jenkins was arrested. And soon after both Henry and Atkinson were also taken into custody. Victim No. 6 said he doesn’t know if one of the other victims identified them or if Jenkins told police during an interrogation who else was involved. Then Ceniceros-Deleon was finally picked up when he showed up at his mother’s home for Thanksgiving dinner in 2020.
Each of the four assailants involved took a plea deal. Henry, Ceniceros-Deleon and Atkinson were sentenced in June 2021, and Jenkins, whose attorney kept filing motions to delay, was finally sentenced in October 2021.
Victim No. 6 was the only one of the victims to attend each hearing and to speak in court. Because the four assailants took plea deals, there wasn’t a trial, but Victim No. 6 offered a victim’s impact statement during the sentencing hearings.
The others, Victim No. 6 said, told him, “I’m over it,” and “I’ve moved on.”
But “I didn’t want these jackasses to ever be in a position to do this to anyone again,” Victim No. 6 said.
Still, going to court to face his kidnappers terrified him. And Victim No. 6 got little help from Texas, despite the state having a victim’s compensation fund. The state, the man said, treated him despicably.
But then the federal government took over the case and added federal hate crime charges to existing charges of kidnapping, robbery and assault. Once the feds stepped in, Texas responded.
Victim No. 6 had already replaced his car, but he needed oral surgery to replace the teeth he lost when he was beaten. And he needed counseling.
The counseling he got at first was awful, Victim No. 6 said. Rather than focus in on his trauma, the counselor began examining the man’s relationship as a child with his parents.
But the day before he was set to appear in court, Victim No. 6 called counselor Jimmy Owen. Owen, he said, “gave me strength to testify the next day.”
The delays in getting justice were traumatic but unavoidable. The date for the first court hearing had been scheduled for just weeks after the first lock-down forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. That lock-down, of course, delayed all pending trials.
Owen, who had his client’s permission to talk about the story, said there’s a process for dealing with trauma. The first step is stabilization. He said Victim No. 6 was dealing with severe PTSD, but as they spoke, the man began processing what happened to desensitize him to the events.
“He still has triggers,” Owen said. And as he told the story, more than four years after his ordeal, the victim still got emotional at several points. He said giving the victim impact statement was empowering; it was a turning point. Victim No. 6 said he has learned to make the attack something that happened to him, to pull it to the side rather than seeing everything through the cloud of the event.
Owen said they’ve worked to decrease the shame and irrational guilt Victim No. 6 feels, something that many victims of crime have to deal with. But, the counselor said, in his eyes, Victim No. 6 is something of a hero, because throughout his ordeal, the man not only remained calm himself, he helped keep the other victims calm, preventing even more violence.
Owen said he’s seen Victim No. 6 go from victim to survivor to advocate for other crime victims.
Victim No. 6 had advice for anyone using Grindr: Talk to the person you meet online for several days before meeting. When you do meet them, make it somewhere very public. Don’t go to someone else’s house, especially if you don’t know the person. And if you invite someone into your home, have a plan to defend yourself in case something should happen.
While the four perpetrators in this crime are each in federal prison serving their terms, Texas has decided to pursue state charges against them. Victim No. 6 said he won’t be participating in those trials, although his victim’s impact statement is recorded and may be used.
After giving his statement in court, Victim No. 6 ended by telling the judge, “For five years I was a victim. Today, I’m a survivor.”
