‘He’s here with me:’ Walmart shooting survivor honors late father at quinceañera

SOCORRO, Texas – Karina García clutched the metal urn carrying her father’s ashes and she swayed alone on the dance floor at El Campanario Ballroom for the last family waltz of her quinceañera on Saturday night.

The DJ played a Gabby Tamez rendition of “Préstame a Mi Padre,” a song about loving and longing, about begging God for just a few more minutes with Dad from heaven. Days before her 15th birthday celebration, Karina said she just wants to remember, “In the moment, he’s here with me.”

Guillermo “Memo” García, also known as Tank, died on April 25, 2020, at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso.

The girls soccer coach succumbed to gunshot injuries nearly nine months after a white nationalist opened fire on him and others visiting a Walmart store near Cielo Vista Mall on Aug. 3, 2019. The gunman killed 23 people and was sentenced in June to life in federal prison.

The shadow of the massacre still lingers over survivors like the García family. But with the passing of time, they chart ways to heal and move forward. Saturday’s quinceañera marked another step forward.

When Memo’s widow Jessica García drives on Interstate 10, she avoids looking at the Walmart. A judge’s gag order limits what victims can say to the public about the day of the shooting that could affect the killer’s pending state trial.

Jessica focuses on preserving Memo’s life instead.

“My only goal in life is for my kids to be good people,” Jessica said. “I don’t want to be full of hate.”

The first winter in 2020 without Memo was hard, Jessica said.

Her husband was cheesy for Christmas, she said. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Memo would string lights outside their house and help the kids decorate the tree as Christmas movies played on the background: “The Grinch,” “A Christmas Carol,” and a black-and-white western Memo used to watch in Ciudad Juárez.

By the end of the day, it looked like Santa threw up in their house, Jessica joked.

More: ‘La pérdida - The loss’: Deadly disaster at El Paso, Juárez border

Since his death, the family has pieced back together some of their old routines. The holiday decorations are up, along with Elf on a Shelf. Jessica bought a Snickers cake for Memo’s birthday in late November. He would have turned 40 this year.

“Christmas is not the same and I’ve accepted it,” Jessica said. “Now I feel like it’s just decorations. But I try to make some joy for my kids because Christmas is different for kids than it is for adults. It’s not just for me, it’s for them. The pressure is on me to be in the Christmas spirit.”

‘That fairytale love does exist’

The older their son gets, the more he looks like his dad.

Jessica thought this on a sweltering summer night after 10-year-old Memito, or “little Memo” as he’s also called, walked off the baseball field.

His dad, “Big Memo,” coached both his son’s baseball team and daughter’s soccer team. Memito’s current team, the Silverbacks, just lost to the Gators in a tournament in Las Cruces, but he seemed to be in good spirits, giving hugs to family friends who stopped to chat with his mom.

“My baby is a lover,” Jessica said before her son gave her a hug in the bleachers.

He’s also too naive, she said in a worried tone – a mother caught in the balance of savoring her child’s innocence while preparing him for life’s cruel possibilities. Memito was 6 when his father took a bullet to the spine to shield Jessica. Now Memito has lost one of his protectors.

When Jessica and Memo attended Montwood High School, their friends called him Tanque, or Tank, because he was giant and protective, Jessica said of her 6-foot-3 husband. She described him as generous, whether it was giving rides or giving pizza to his friends from his job at Speedy’s Pizza.

And girls at their school melted for him.

Memo’s sisters Raquel and Ana García agreed: Their brother was a ladies’ man. When Raquel worked at Bonny’s Cafe, Memo would stroll into the restaurant during lunch with six girls around him, she said.

When Memo picked girls up, he always knocked on their door, never honked from the car, Jessica remembered. And when he gave them rides back home, he insisted on walking them to their front door.

But there was one girl he wanted most.

Jessica and Memo started dating in high school. He made her happy even when they had almost nothing, she said.

After high school, they decided to strike out on their own and moved to Salina, Kansas, where they worked at a pizza factory. In the first house they bought in Kansas, they slept on a mattress on the floor and for curtains, covered their windows with black towels they plucked from a giveaway bin. In their free time they went fishing at a nearby pond where the air was thick with humidity and the sound of insects buzzing.

One night when Memo came home from a late shift, he shook her awake with a box of Russell Stover chocolates and wished her a happy birthday. Under one chocolate was an engagement ring.

“That fairytale love does exist,” Jessica said. “It wasn’t perfect. There were times I hated him and he probably hated me. I used to ask him what my life would be like without him. I’d sing ‘Hasta La Miel Amarga’ to him.”

In the Los Tiranos del Norte song, the norteño singer croons in the opening lines:

¿Qué sería de mi vida si tú me dejaras?¿Qué sería de mi vida si tú te marcharas?

“What would my life be if you left me?“What would my life be if you go?”

Big Memo was ‘siempre grande’

At a dress fitting in Juárez, Karina twirled in her quinceañera dress.

The shiny, voluminous white dress, embroidered with a rainbow of flowers, has a royal blue sash – her favorite color, and her dad’s favorite color, too. The dress was incomplete, but that didn’t stop her grandfather, Memo’s father Guillermo García, from beaming as he took photos with his phone.

Guillermo lives not far from the dressmaker in the Aztecas neighborhood in central Juárez. Memo grew up there, the middle child sandwiched between two sisters, Raquel and Ana.

Memo was siempre grande, a child full of mischief and jokes, playing in boxes, Guillermo recalled. Memo didn’t care for school work and preferred playing soccer with his friends or his dad in the park.

Every day after school, Memo played outside with friends – and he made friends with ease, so there were always friends, said Memo’s mother María. Whether it was camping, fishing or growing vegetables in the garden, any chance to spend time outside with his family made him happy, María said.

Ana said she and her older brother didn’t fight often growing up, but he liked to tease that she was found in the trash.

“He would always tell me I was adopted, like all the time,” Ana said. “He would be like, ‘Be thankful to my parents because we picked you up from the trash.’”

The jokes didn’t stop when Memo got older, Karina said.

She likes to tell her brother Memito about a particular time when he was about 3 and hitting their dad on the leg. Memito kept yelling, “You’re not going to do nothing to me!”

Memo yanked him by the pajamas and tied him to the bed by his sleeves.

Memito asks Karina for stories of them all together because he doesn’t have as many memories as the rest of the family.

ometimes, when Memito has difficulty falling asleep, he comes into her room in the middle of the night and asks her to sleep with him. He’ll stare at photos of their dad propped in his room and ask Karina if she ever misses him. Karina wishes she could somehow copy and paste all her memories of their dad into a home movie and show him.

“He constantly asks me, ‘Do you have a video of him talking?’ He’s just always asking me questions about him,” Karina said.

Cowboys, horses and traces of Dad

Grief is a lot of back and forth, Jessica said on a cloudy November day as she cooked pozole rojo in her East El Paso home.

Jessica began dating again and fell in love with her boyfriend, whom Karina refers to as her stepfather.

She once dreamed that she, her boyfriend and the children were shopping at the mall when Memo appeared around the corner, dressed like he was ready to coach Memito’s baseball game, and urged them to hurry up. Memo had always been a punctual person who felt like if he wasn’t early, he was late, she said. He was early to arrive and late to leave to make sure he got a word with everyone he wanted to see.

She doesn’t tell her boyfriend about every dream.

“It’s not fair to him,” Jessica said. “I had a lot bottled up and it doesn’t help that kids can’t understand you can love two people at the same time. That you can move on and love someone new.”

Memo doesn’t have a gravesite yet. Jessica set up a mantle in her house with the urn of Memo’s ashes and a toy army tank, a nod to the “Tank Tough” slogan his supporters printed on T-shirts and made into bracelets during his hospital stay.

Memo sits next to the urn holding the ashes of Tita, a feisty Chihuahua and Miniature Pinscher mix who got in the trash cans and moved the pillows on the couch. In Memo’s heart-filled eyes, she could do no wrong, Jessica said. They called her their children’s sister.

At 4 p.m. every day, Tita used to wait for Memo at the front door until he’d come home from his job transporting heavy machinery. After Memo died, Jessica placed his urn on the nightstand. Tita would sleep on Memo’s side of the bed – like she knew, Jessica said. Tita later died of old age.

As Jessica prepped the pozole in the kitchen, Memito and Karina alternated between play-fighting in the living room and taking breaks to reheat sopapillas.

“She really is her brother’s keeper, as much as they fight,” Jessica said.

“You’re gonna get honey on the floor,” Karina said, pointing out the drizzle of honey that’s about to fall off Memito’s sopapilla.

“No, I’m not,” he insisted, holding the sopapilla above his open mouth.

Memito and Karina argue sometimes, including over whose team was better, the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers.

“Karina likes the Cowboys,” Memito said in an accusatory tone.

“Cowboys were Daddy’s team,” she shot back.

Jessica made a strict agreement with Memo to not force their teams upon the children, who chose their allegiances early: Memito with Mom’s beloved 49ers, Karina with Dad’s Cowboys after abandoning the Denver Broncos, whom she picked first because she likes horses.

When Memo was hospitalized at Del Sol Medical Center, people brought him Cowboys memorabilia to cheer him up. Karina has saved most of them, including a lumpy Cowboys pillow that sits on her bed.

Jessica knows the precision of details will fade eventually. The scent of his body, mingled with cologne, in a warm embrace. The raspiness of his voice and the sound of the whistle he made from the sidelines of soccer and baseball games.

“After he died, I told (Karina) she should stay a Cowboys fan because that’s what she had with Daddy,” Jessica said. “Time takes a little bit more of him away.”

Karina remembers the scent of ripe strawberry coming from the air freshener hanging in her dad’s silver Ford truck.

One afternoon, when just Karina and Memo were home, he saw Karina express frustration as she struggled with math homework. Memo told her to hop in the truck.

They drove to a ditch in the Chamizal neighborhood, near the first house 15-year-old Memo lived in when his family moved to El Paso. He told her there were many days he didn’t want to do his homework, that he felt dumb for not knowing English and struggled with the transition.

Memo used to go to that spot, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone just to think.

“I think he wanted to just show me it’s OK when I’m frustrated to give myself a break,” she said.

Karina said she doesn’t worry about forgetting her dad’s face or voice because she has photos and videos for that. She worries more about forgetting what his hugs feel like, the way he held her hand or put his arm around her when they talked just the two of them.

“You could tell he was really listening,” Karina said. “He would look at you and see on top of what you’re saying. For me, now it’s hard to find someone who will really listen.”

In her bedroom, Karina pulled up pictures from equine therapy on her phone. After the shooting, the El Paso United Family Resiliency Center paid for counseling for victims. Memito attended counseling at the El Paso Child Guidance Center, but Karina said she stopped going because she didn’t like talking about her feelings then.

The Resiliency Center then connected her with Compadres Therapy in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, where she brushed a horse and led it around the grounds. She painted colorful flowers on its white coat. Horses are used in therapy because they’re attuned to people’s behaviors and emotions.

In Kansas, Memo once plopped young Karina on her tío’s horse, so horses remind her of him.

“It’s just me and the horse,” Karina said. “The horse had a naturally calm effect and I could relax. I didn’t have to talk about it.”

Memo’s final months

The first time trauma surgeon Dr. Rahul Rasheed saw Memo was in the operating room at Del Sol Medical Center. Rasheed’s colleague, Dr. Christopher Bell, conducted the first operation on Memo that saved his life. The bullets struck Memo’s organs in the chest and abdomen, as well as his spinal cord.

But Memo kept bleeding and leaking organ fluids, requiring more operations as he fought for his life over the next months.

The human body can only endure so much, even for someone as tough as a tank, but Rasheed believes Memo held on as long as he did for just a little more time with his family.

“Losing a patient like this just destroys you,” Rasheed said. “It hurts in ways you can’t describe. Losing someone like Memo, you feel like you failed your community. This was the last guy in the shooting. It was my responsibility to get him out of the hospital and have a happy ending. But I couldn’t do that. This was the last thing this town needed to hear, that someone else died.”

Memo had good days and bad days, and for those nearly nine months he was alive, they had hope.

Genesis Davila visited Memo at the hospital on some of those good days. Memo coached Davila, who’s now 16, when she and Karina played for youth soccer team EP Fusion. The soccer team was fundraising at Walmart for their upcoming season when the shooting occurred.

She was the oldest and tallest player on EP Fusion when she first met Coach Memo, she said. Davila had a tendency to back off when games got physical, so Memo coached her to use her height – to not let her rivals push her around, to stand her ground and push back.

But what she misses the most are his comforting hugs at the beginning and end of every practice. He felt like a teddy bear, she said. That’s probably why Memito became a hugger, she added.

She recalled the first time Coach Memo spoke to her since the shooting.

“He told me, ‘Don’t cry, everything is going to be alright,’” Davila said. “And I believed that.”

After Jessica recovered from her own gunshot injuries, she saw Memo every day until the coronavirus pandemic forced the hospital to restrict visitors. Rasheed said he would have forgotten to eat so many days if it weren’t for Memo’s mother María and Jessica, who brought enchiladas, ceviche and chile colorado to the hospital.

Maria watched over Memo, a grown man, like he was her baby, Rasheed said.

She was the oldest and tallest player on EP Fusion when she first met Coach Memo, she said. Davila had a tendency to back off when games got physical, so Memo coached her to use her height – to not let her rivals push her around, to stand her ground and push back.

But what she misses the most are his comforting hugs at the beginning and end of every practice. He felt like a teddy bear, she said. That’s probably why Memito became a hugger, she added.

She recalled the first time Coach Memo spoke to her since the shooting.

“He told me, ‘Don’t cry, everything is going to be alright,’” Davila said. “And I believed that.”

After Jessica recovered from her own gunshot injuries, she saw Memo every day until the coronavirus pandemic forced the hospital to restrict visitors. Rasheed said he would have forgotten to eat so many days if it weren’t for Memo’s mother María and Jessica, who brought enchiladas, ceviche and chile colorado to the hospital.

Maria watched over Memo, a grown man, like he was her baby, Rasheed said.

Jessica didn’t like to bring her children on the bad days, preferring to video call them over FaceTime. She didn’t want them to remember their father as frail after another surgery. But they came for Memo’s birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and even if he couldn’t speak, Memo would make funny faces and blow kisses to let them know he was there, Rasheed said.

On another good day, after making sure Memo was stable enough to handle it, his critical care team wheeled him to the courtyard on his floor. It was the first time he had been outside since entering the hospital. For once, people were laughing and weren’t talking to Memo about how sick he was, Rasheed said.

He described the atmosphere as an afternoon in the park with friends. Memo fell asleep in the sunshine.

María carried a glittery blue placard with a photo of her son, who donned a Cowboys cap and gray industrial work shirt with the name tag, Tank. “In honor of the father of the quinceañera who’s accompanying us from heaven,” it read in Spanish.

Raquel and Ana also attended, wearing silver pins with a locket-sized photo of their brother dangling from them. They gave Memito, or Tanquecito as they call him, a squeeze after Mass.

“He looks very much like my brother when he was that age,” Raquel said.

Gusts of cold wind blew their hair askew, but Ana remembered what Memo used to always chide in jest: El frío es mental. She hugged herself and repeated the mantra later that chilly night as she walked up to the doors of the quinceañera ballroom.

When Memo and Karina talked about her future quinceañera, he didn’t care about how she wore her hair or what shoes she wanted, Karina said. He cared that she kept her relationship with God.

Sometimes after Thanksgiving, Memo would take his family to spots where homeless people slept outside. They gave out blankets, beanies and gloves, some years chicken or turkey.

“He always told us you never know if that could be you,” Karina said. “You never know if it could be your family. At the end of the day, everyone is under God’s family so they are our family.”

The party commenced on Saturday night at El Campanario Ballroom in Socorro, where Jessica commandeered the schedule of events, a general in a floor-length, royal blue dress.

“I know if I’m not good, my kids aren’t good,” Jessica said. “At this part of my life, I’m at peace.”

Davila, one of the damas Karina selected for her Court of Honor, joined Karina for a series of choreographed dances, from Selena’s “Dreaming of You” to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” Bonded as survivors, Davila said that Karina may look “strong on the outside,” but she just wants Karina to have happiness.

Rasheed, who has since moved back to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, mingled at one table with other physicians who tended to Memo at the hospital. He still keeps in touch with the family and helps Karina with her biology homework – though sometimes he talks too fast and uses “doctor language” instead of “plain English,” Karina said.

“I told Jessica, we got to start preparing Karina to apply for college,” Rasheed said.

Karina attends Pebble Hills Early College, a dual learning program between Pebble Hills High School and El Paso Community College, where she plans to take veterinary technician training. Some days, the grief creeps up on her at school, making it difficult to concentrate. But like her mom, she’s begun to feel at peace now and the memories bring her happiness, not just sadness, she said.

Memories like when she was a little girl and she told her dad she wanted to be a veterinarian. He used to watch animal documentaries with her, even memorizing the facts and science terminology, Karina said.

“It makes me happy that I got to know him and have him as my dad,” Karina said. “If he was at my quinceañera, I would tell him thank you for everything. Thank you for the memories. Thank you for the time you took to be with me.”

And thank you for the dance.

Préstame a mi padrePor favor Diosito, no lo regreso tardeY si lloro, no es de tristezaSino porque sé que estás aquí conmigoY estoy sintiendo ese abrazo

Lend me my fatherPlease God, I won’t return him lateAnd if I cry, it’s not from sadnessBut because I know he is here with meAnd I’m feeling his embrace

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Walmart shooting victim Coach Memo Garcia honored at daughter's quinceañera