Jose Campos Torres grew up in a barrio in Houston's East End, the son of Jose Luna Torres Jr., in a family of Mexican descent. He left school after the eighth grade and dreamed of opening a karate school in his neighborhood, teaching young people self-defense. He knew he needed a GED, a driver's license, and steady work to get there. Torres enlisted in the United States Army, where he was accepted into Army Ranger training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was discharged in September 1976 under a general discharge. His brother Gilbert said the normal Joe was different from the drunk Joe. Two weeks before his death, Torres had found work as a glass contractor earning $2.75 an hour. He was 23 years old, still trying to stitch together the pieces of a life that poverty and limited education had kept fragmented.

Shortly before midnight on May 5, 1977, Cinco de Mayo, Torres was arrested for disorderly conduct at Club 21, a bar in Houston's predominantly Hispanic East End. He was wearing his army fatigues and military boots. Six responding officers took him not to the station but to a place they called "The Hole," a spot behind a warehouse overlooking Buffalo Bayou. They beat him there. When they finally brought Torres to the city jail, a supervisor took one look at his injuries and ordered the officers to take him to Ben Taub Hospital. They did not comply. Instead, they drove Torres back to The Hole and pushed him off a wharf into the dark water. Three days later, his body was found floating in the bayou near the 1200 block of Commerce Street in downtown Houston.

Officers Terry W. Denson and Stephen Orlando were charged with murder. Three other officers were fired by Police Chief B.G. Bond, though none faced criminal charges. A rookie officer present during the beating and drowning became the prosecution's key witness. On October 7, 1977, an all-white jury convicted Denson and Orlando not of murder but of negligent homicide, a misdemeanor. The judge sentenced them to one year of probation and fined each officer one dollar. The verdict landed like an accelerant on decades of simmering tension. The U.S. Department of Justice later reviewed the case at the federal level, securing civil rights convictions against three of the officers. Denson, Orlando, and fired officer Joseph Janish served nine months in federal prison. It was the federal system, not the state, that delivered something closer to accountability.

On the one-year anniversary of Torres's death, between five and six thousand people gathered at Moody Park in Houston's Near Northside for a Cinco de Mayo celebration. When police arrived to make arrests for disorderly conduct, the crowd turned. Voices shouted, "You'll kill them the way you killed Jose Campos Torres." The chanting began: "Justice for Joe Torres. Viva Joe Torres." Bottles and rocks flew. The Fulton Village shopping center was looted and set ablaze. Fourteen of the eighteen cars destroyed were police vehicles. KPRC-TV reporters Jack Cato and Phil Archer arrived early and were beaten and stabbed. The 1978 Moody Park Riot forced Houston to confront the consequences of a justice system that had failed its Mexican-American community.

Decades passed before Houston formally reckoned with Torres's death. In June 2021, Police Chief Troy Finner apologized to the Torres family, calling the killing "straight-up murder." On April 2, 2022, the city unveiled the Joe Campos Torres Memorial Plaza and trail along Buffalo Bayou, the same waterway where his body was found. Mayor Sylvester Turner said at the dedication, "His life mattered, and our city will never let something like this happen again." Torres's nephew, Shawn Carreon, spoke of his mother and grandmother finally finding some peace. Gil Scott-Heron memorialized Torres in a song, calling him a brother. The memorial stands at the intersection of memory and accountability, a place where Houston acknowledges that the fight for civil rights is measured not only in courtroom victories but in the willingness to name what happened and refuse to forget.