NBC News, November 2023
Deborah Anchondo likes when her nephew plays with his carts at the family’s auto shop in El Paso, Texas. “He is innocent, very handsome, a happy child — a miracle that he was saved,” she said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo. What she doesn’t like is when, in children’s games, the little boy takes a toy gun and wants to shoot the bad guys.
The 43-year-old woman’s voice still quivers when she talks about Aug. 3, 2019, the day Andre and Jordan Anchondo, her brother and sister-in-law, were shot to death while protecting their son, who was then only 2 months old, in a racist rampage against Latinos in a Walmart shopping center in El Paso that left 23 people dead and over two dozen injured.
“Before that, the only thing that had happened to me was that my car stereo was stolen in 1998. Now we are also victims of that resentment, that hatred that completely changed El Paso,” said Anchondo, who helps raise Paul Gilbert, his brother’s son.
