Audio By Carbonatix
When Ben Covalt moved into his small home in northwest Denver in 1996, he looked forward to renovating the house and turning the large yard into an oasis, a quiet retreat from the hassles of city life. Instead, he spent the next four and a half years in an escalating series of confrontations with a man who lived across the street.
The trouble began after Covalt’s partner, Claudio Garay, moved in with him. According to Covalt, his neighbor, Fidel Morales, was outraged that an openly gay couple was living nearby. Covalt says Morales began a daily campaign of harassment that included spying on them with a telescope and taunting them with shouts of “Joto!” — the Spanish equivalent of “faggot” — at all hours of the day and night. Around the same time, someone began throwing rocks at the men’s house and smashing the windshields of their cars. Covalt believes it was Morales. Most disturbingly, last July someone put a BB gun down their Chihuahua’s throat and pulled the trigger. The dog died in agony.
Covalt says he first noted that Morales was watching him in the spring of 1997. “I began to notice every time I was outside that this guy was sitting there watching,” he says. “He was always standing around staring.”
A little later, Garay decided to approach Morales and walked across the street to talk to him. “I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?'” he recalls. “He told me I must be Ben’s Mexican houseboy. He said, ‘The guy you’re living with is paying you to be with him. How much does he pay you?'”
From there, things got worse. One morning that summer, Garay says he went outside to work in the garden wearing shorts and no shirt. The next thing he knew, Morales was standing in his truck, giving him the finger. “He said, ‘Don’t ever expose yourself to me again.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘I don’t like your kind, and I don’t want to ever see that again.'”
Exasperated, Covalt began keeping detailed records of all the encounters with Morales and any suspicious incidents. The log started in 1997, when someone slashed the tires on Garay’s car. Over the next few months, he says, there were repeated acts of vandalism against his house and against his and Garay’s cars, as well as physical threats and constant verbal harassment from Morales. “He’d stand in the middle of the street holding a tire iron and pace up and down the street smashing the tire iron in his hand,” says Covalt. “He’d say, ‘Hello, joto.'”
In January 1998, Covalt and Garay asked for and received a permanent restraining order against Morales, specifying that he couldn’t come within 25 yards of their home. That order also said Morales couldn’t hurl rocks at the house or communicate with Covalt or Garay in any way. But Covalt’s journal shows that the vandalism didn’t stop: So many rocks were thrown at the house that Covalt began collecting them as evidence, gathering the stones each day and putting them in marked plastic bags.
He also began calling the police on a regular basis, accusing Morales of violating the restraining order. He says Morales always denied the allegations, however, and the police maintained it was nothing but one person’s word against another. Eventually, Covalt says, the officers told him they were tired of dealing with the dispute and wanted him to stop calling. “The police would say, ‘So a rock got thrown at your house. How do you know it was him?'”
Over four years, Covalt says he filed 26 police reports and went to court fourteen times. The city attorney opened five different cases against Morales but dropped most of them after concluding that they came down to one neighbor’s word against another. Covalt’s two adult daughters and a friend all testified that they had witnessed the harassment against the couple, but they weren’t regarded as objective observers. One case was referred to mediation; in another, Morales was found not guilty of breaking the car windows of a friend visiting Covalt.
Then one night last March, Covalt heard noises in the alley and went outside to investigate. He saw a man who appeared to be a drunk, dressed in a jacket and a stocking cap, lying down against a fence behind the house. When Covalt approached to see who it was, he says the man attacked him. It was Morales. “He took a swing at me and knocked my glasses off,” says Covalt. “He was two feet from me. I lost it and just beat the shit out of him.”
Garay came running and helped Covalt wrestle Morales to the ground. They sat on top of him, and Morales began yelling for help. Several police cars showed up. Morales was arrested and charged with violating the restraining order by coming too close to the house.
Earlier this month, Morales pled guilty to the charge; Denver county judge Robert Crew gave him a 180-day suspended jail sentence and fined him $150. He noted that Morales had moved across town in August but said he wanted the two parties to stay away from each other.
Morales’s attorney, Bill Robinson, insists that it is his client who has been harassed by Covalt and Garay. On the day that Garay says he was outside in his shorts and no shirt, Robinson claims, Garay was actually in a bathrobe and had flashed Morales. “The young guy exposed himself,” he says. “Morales told him he didn’t appreciate it and said, ‘If you do that again, I’ll push your teeth down your throat.’ There’s no question he did that, but he denies the other things they say about him.”
Robinson tried, unsuccessfully, to get a restraining order preventing Covalt and Garay from coming near Morales. “Every time they got the authorities to haul him in, the city attorney said he couldn’t prove the case and dropped it,” he says. “I tried to get a restraining order so Fidel wouldn’t get beat up again.” According to Robinson, Morales was in the alley because he was taking a shortcut to get to a neighborhood restaurant. “Fidel admitted he violated the restraining order because he was going from one place to another to get something to eat. When you violate a restraining order, you should say you’re sorry, but to be beat up for it is inappropriate.”
For Covalt and Garay, the most painful experience was the death of their dog, Milo, in July. The Chihuahua had been an energetic and friendly dog, and Garay was shocked to come home one day and find him curled up in his bed, struggling to breathe. “I thought, he’s getting sick, he’s wheezing so much we need to get him to the vet,” says Garay.
The veterinarian then discovered a puncture wound in the back of Milo’s mouth. After taking X-rays, she told them someone had shot Milo with a BB gun. The dog died shortly after. No one was ever arrested in the case.
Even though Morales has moved, Covalt has now put his home up for sale, saying he wants to make a new start somewhere else. He still turns the lights off on his car when he drives into the alley at night, always entering through the back door so no one will know he’s home — a practice he began a few years ago when the harassment was at its worst. And both men still listen for the sound of rocks hitting the roof.
Covalt says the experience has shown him how little protection people have from hate crimes, even if they go to the authorities and ask for help. “Fidel Morales had an obsession with us similar to what a stalker has to his victim,” he says. “We tried to follow the law and not become vigilantes. The police didn’t help at all. The city attorney’s office didn’t help at all. The offenses against us were trivialized. That’s why this has gone on for four and a half years.”
