In the old days, they were a team, glued tight. There was Luis Jimenez, his big brother Oscar Jimenez Sr., and Oscar’s little boy, Oscar Jr. This cross-generational crew was always on the move, grabbing a bite to eat, going to the arcade to play video games or sneaking around the multiplex, giggling their way from movie to movie.
“We were like a three-guy gang”, Oscar Sr. says, choking up, looking into the eyes of Luis, their sister Rosa and their mother Maria Elena in the family’s living room in San Jose’s Alma neighborhood. The family is taking stock, remembering, but looking ahead, too, trying to imagine a future beyond their constant sorrow.
It’s been nearly two years since Oscar Jr., 6 at the time, disappeared; 15 months since the police found his body under a slab of quick-dry cement in Phoenix. The killing sent the Jimenez clan into a nose-dive, “but I think it affected Luis the most,” Oscar Sr. says. “It brought him down. His morale wasn’t there and everything seemed to slow down in his life because of this great loss.”
Oscar Sr., 31, doesn’t need to describe his own devastation at his son’s killing, a brutal one, purportedly committed by a man named Samuel Corona Jr.— the boyfriend of Oscar Sr.’s ex-wife, Kathryn Jimenez. (Corona, whose case is pending, is charged with torturing and murdering the child. Earlier this year, Kathryn Jimenez pleaded guilty to child abduction, child endangerment and as an accessory after the act to her son’s murder.)
It’s just that Luis, a 15-year-old sophomore at Willow Glen High School when his nephew vanished, was somehow especially vulnerable.
A self-described “average student” and always the reserved type –”I kind of keep things to myself,” he admits – Luis suddenly went AWOL at school. He skipped classes, quit the junior varsity football team, rejected the comforts of friends and family. “I would just come home,” he says. “Lay down in my room. Sleep. Try not to remember about little Luis.”
The child had been badly abused; Luis, once his nephew’s baby sitter, sat through gruesome testimony in court.
The silver lining in this overwhelmingly sad tale has a name: Maria Luisa Rodriguez, a 23-year-old case manager and counselor with the Alum Rock Counseling Center. She is one of those souls who always keeps an eye out for the boy or girl who’s not quite making it – and Luis wasn’t quite making it.
Alerted to his problems by the high school’s attendance office, she made contact with the teen. Nip the problem in the bud: That was the plan. Too many truants get sucked into a system of bureaucratic oversight that’s designed to help but sometimes leaves young people with confusing new burdens: fines, entanglements with the district attorney’s office.
“I told him I’m a mentor and my goal is to motivate you back to school,” Rodriguez says.
She went to work, implementing ARCC’s Truancy Reduction Services program on Luis’ behalf. What this meant, essentially, was sitting Luis down and really talking with him once a week for three months, trying to get him to unload his worries, to shake his depression. At first, she says, “I can barely get even two words out of him. He seemed like a very well-known guy in school. But he was just pushing everyone away.”
Little by little, Luis opened up. Rodriguez understood what he was going through; while working toward her degree in social work at Fresno State, she had interned as a victim’s advocate in child abuse cases for the Fresno County Probation Department. Also, Rodriguez was only a year older than Luis’ sister and shared some of Rosa’s fashion sense.
“One day he walked in,” Rodriguez recalls, “and says, ‘I like your nails. My sister likes those, too.’ I had zebra nails. Well, I thought that was the cutest, funniest thing, because I never thought he would say something like that. Very shocking!”
Back in the Jimenez family’s living room – where photos of Oscar Jr., smiling hugely and scrubbed clean in Sunday clothes, line the walls – Rodriguez reminds Luis of how far he has come. Now 17 and a senior at Willow Glen, he was back playing linebacker, this time for the varsity squad. His grades are all over the map, but he’s learning something about academic persistence.
“I just go day by day,” he says with a smile, but still managing to look a little sad. “I want to be the first in the family to graduate high school, and I’m aiming to be a cop.” Why a police officer? “My family always raised me to be a good kid, just doing the right thing.”
Adds his big brother: “He’s kind of like a marathon runner, and we’re trying to push him across the finish line.”
Wish Book readers can assist in giving Luis that big push by donating toward buying him a Macintosh laptop computer (gifts of $50 will go toward the total of $1,000), something he’ll need as he forges ahead academically.
Readers also can help other young people by supporting the Truancy Reduction Services program, which has a way of touching teens like Luis Jimenez. Each donation of $50 will build a fund to purchase bus passes, healthy snacks, gift cards, movie passes and other incentives that help counselors motivate and encourage.