“Everyone’s Child” expected to be installed near city hall next month
Published in the January 6 – 19, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
The night of the shooting, Joseph Romero’s mobile phone ran out of power. He put it in the upstairs office recharger and went to bed. Later, the land-line phone in the darkness of his Fresno home rang, waking him. The caller notified him that a Fresno County sheriff deputy was waiting for him outside. When Romero met him, the law officer told him to call his ex-wife Annette. There had been “an accident.”
Romero immediately went upstairs to his cellphone and turned it on. Many voice-mail messages and texts and alarms appeared on the screen. In a moment, shock hit the man. His beloved 14-year-old daughter was dead. Tara Romero had been the butterfly blessing of his life.
“Oh, my God, the news just floored me,” Joseph said in a phone interview from his Fresno home as he described his reaction. “I was in the military and I went to Vietnam and I left everything behind, the violence and the war and everything. And to actually hear your own child had died by gunshot, I kept thinking, why didn’t she drop to the ground? I mean, it happened, there’s nothing you can do to change it. You can say it was fate. I never thought it would happened like this in my family.”
From the loss of his child, Joseph fell into a deep depression. His inner turmoil impacted his family life and job. But he knew he didn’t want to “waste energy” on the negative emotions. He decided to find a project that would help him heal — and that led him to work with the Morgan Hill community to construct a life-sized statue of Tara.
More than four years after the shooting, the artwork “Everyone’s Child” is nearly complete. Joseph hopes to install it next month in the new demonstration garden in the civic center plaza next to city hall.
The shooting the evening of Friday Nov. 4, 2011 was a random act of violence. Tara and several friends stood chatting outside the Village Avante apartments on the corner of Cosmo and Del Monte avenues. Without warning, gunfire erupted from a passing car. One of the kids fled and escaped injury. Rosa Castaneda, then 14, Alicia Sotelo, then 15, and Chris Loredo, then 16, were hit by bullets but survived. Tara laid motionless on the ground. The children had been waiting for a ride home following a pizza party celebrating a friend’s birthday.
Morgan Hill police patrolled the streets and later that night found the suspects — four adults and a 17-year-old juvenile — at an apartment less than a mile from the crime scene. The shooters were Sureno gang members. They told police investigators that Nortenos had broken their car’s window and threw rocks at them. They were looking for someone to take revenge on.
“Can you believe this?” Joseph asked. “They went out looking for someone to shoot in retaliation for breaking their window. This is a point I just don’t get. Why would you shoot at a group of little kids who you know darn well are not gang members? And they admitted they were going for gang members.”
The suspects are charged with murder, attempted murder, and carrying out a crime for the benefit of a criminal gang. Four of them have been in custody at Santa Clara County Jail since their arrest. Suspect Ramon Gutierrez of Morgan Hill was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial during the preliminary hearing in June 2013 and is in a state mental health facility. The other suspects are Esmeling Bahena of Morgan Hill; Fernando Mateo Lopez of Gilroy; Ricardo Diaz of Morgan Hill; and Primitivo Hernandez of San Jose. The trial is expected to start Jan. 19.
The shooting that night stole the life of a young girl who was a friendly and free-spirited freshman at Sobrato High School. Tara was born and raised in Morgan Hill. She cared about people and was popular. She got along well with her step-sisters, Regina and Catherine, from Joseph’s second marriage, and her older brother, Joseph Jr., was her idol. She liked to joke around with friends and family. She was an average kid who liked to have fun, Joseph said.
“She did tell me at one time that she wanted to go to Harvard, which floored me because I was thinking about the tuition,” he recalls with a laugh. “I said, ‘You better start working now.’ She said she wanted to go to another state and she wanted to travel when she got older. I guess, young people, they’re more open minded than closed minded — and she wanted to go to Europe and experience different cultures.”
For Tara’s mother, Annette Nevarez, the emotional pain still feels as strong as if the shooting had happened last week. She remembers driving with Tara on hot summer days and seeing women with babies walking in the heat. Tara would always ask Annette to stop and give the women and their child a ride.
“This little girl was an icon,” she said. “Even Mayor Tate, at one of the events where he spoke, he said Tara is like an icon. This little girl tried to help everybody.”
Sometimes when there was a fight at school, Tara would step in and stop the feuders, her mother said.
“She’d say, ‘I don’t care if they spit on you. You’re not suppose to hit them.’ That’s my daughter. She had spirit. This little girl was amazing.”
At Sobrato, Tara was on the honor roll. At June’s graduation ceremony, Nevarez retrieved the diploma and the principal acknowledged the loss.
Nevarez supports Joseph’s “Everyone’s Child” project, seeing the statue as something to help him create a beautiful artwork and share Tara forever with the people of Morgan Hill. The 6-foot-tall statue made of bronze was designed and is being cast by southern California artist David Spellerberg.
“I told Joe, ‘This is your doing,” Nevarez said. “Joe wasn’t here for a lot of the events, and the graduation. But he wanted to do this. I told him I would back him 100 percent. I went to the community and city hall and I spoke. I started it and he’s going to finish it.”
The cost of the statue is $33,000. Joseph set up an account at Wells Fargo Bank for people who wish to donate. He’s paying much of the cost for its construction himself, but said he would appreciate any help. After it is transported to Morgan Hill, a friend in the construction business will build a base for it to sit upon in the demonstration garden. A small butterfly will also be included, appearing to fly out of Tara’s hand.
“It’ll be a memorial to Tara, for a little girl who didn’t deserve this,” Joseph said about how the project has helped him. “She had her life ahead of her. And, no, thinking about it, I lost everything. I had a great job. I had my own home. But I lost everything because of this. My little girl, Catherine and my wife, they suffered along with me because I just refused to do anything. So the statue is not a burden. I accepted the challenge.”
Joseph shared a story about how fate played a role in his last opportunity to spend time with Tara.
“I hadn’t seen my daughter in about eight months and I was missing her,” he said.
He had a business meeting in Florida but canceled the trip.
“I had a couple of days free so instead of going to Florida, I came to Morgan Hill to see Tara,” he said. “And that was Nov. 1, 2011. Why that happened, I don’t know. It was fate. We made plans to see each other soon. And I kissed her and told her I loved her. And three days later she was dead.”
The statue will serve as a reminder that every child’s life is precious, he said. It’s a reminder of how fragile life can be, how it might end suddenly, as what happened to a 14-year-old girl who was innocently waiting for a ride home after a pizza party.
“The statue is called ‘Everyone’s child,’” Joseph said. “This could have happened to anybody. The message we want to share is: Watch your kid and keep the city peaceful.”
