Our Lady of Guadalupe

Time goes on, circling the year, suddenly it's Our Lady of Guadalupe. You decide at some point that a date belongs to a person, because the date of birth is not known to you for sure, or the date of death is too hard to remember. Mike's girlfriend Vanessa has a liturgical date assigned to her. She died on Ash Wednesday, 1996. Had a seizure and fell. I don't know the date. Some time in February. I remember though, because I went to mass that night and it's marked with thoughts of her, every Ash Wednesday is. Even though it is a floating feast.

Fr. Jerry Keaty--didn't know him well enough to know his birthday, and I know he died in June, but I wasn't aware of it the day it happened. But he was buried on a floating feast: Sacred Heart. June 11 that year, my sister's birthday. Sacred Heart--he'd had a heart transplant several years before; officiated at my wedding (he also gave me my first communion, baptized my sister whose birthday he was buried on). His first transplant started to fail on him, but he refused to go on the list again and take a heart from a better candidate.

And today is Jesse's day. He died in the summertime, don't know when he was born. He was Mexican American, but didn't pay much attention to Catholicism. But he had a devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Which somehow is more powerful to me than our bishop having a devotion to her. Here's this young college-aged man, no religious upbringing, openly gay, a risk taker, a party kid, and he cares to pay attention to an apparition of Mary. Cultural connection, perhaps, but his mother's Baptist tradition would have stomped most of that out, I'd think. He probably came to it on his own.

I didn't even know Jesse. He was my sister's friend. But I think of him today, and for the past 10 years on this day, ever since he was murdered in 2004 by Steve Rios, a Columbia, MO, police officer. Rios was trading sex for legal favors--get him out of this ticket, get him off the hook on the drunk and disorderly conduct charge. Rios was married, with a newborn son at home. Jesse became a liability--Rios was using a false name with him, another officer's badge, and Jesse was figuring things out. Rios was taking great risks, and Jesse started telling friends that he was going to confront him because he thought he might be married and he didn't want any part of that. Jesse told folks he thought he might go to the chief of police with the information if Rios didn't get rid of this other charge against him. Ok, so, not the smartest thing to do in a clandestine relationship with a man trained to kill people.

Jesse's body was found a few houses down from my sister's house. She and a roommate identified his body from a photograph. His throat was cut so deeply it nicked his spine. Blood sprayed on the houses. Rios got him into a choke hold, laid his unconscious body on the ground, took out his clip knife, and killed him.

Jesse's friends had bits and pieces and there was this one detective who listened and started to put it together. All of Rios' lies were exposed. He was convicted almost exactly a year after the murder. His legal team got him an appeal and a retrial a few years later, but he was convicted again. It was actually a fascinating tale, but in the end there was still a young man dead and two families broken apart and many individuals whose lives jumped the tracks for several years in the face of this tragedy.

I sat in church this morning, the 3rd Sunday of Advent superseding the feast, staring at the Mary altar arranged with roses, cacti, and candles. I thought about sin and what we do to each other to hide what we have done wrong. How many times we lie to get out of trouble. Blame other people. Threaten and bribe and promise and run away. How deep despair and anxiety must be to lead someone to kill to protect a secret. May I, may each of us, never find ourselves at that depth. Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.