GoFundMe created by LULAC for family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
Courtesy of GoFundMe
There was one sentence in the news coverage that refused to leave me alone.
It wasn’t about immigration.
It wasn’t about law enforcement.
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It wasn’t even about the shooting.
It was a small detail from Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s son. He said his father would come home after work, eat dinner with his wife and spend the evening sitting on the porch listening to music.
I’ve thought about that porch a lot over the last couple of days.
I’m a lawyer with an office in Houston. I’m also someone who didn’t grow up in Texas. Compared with many of my neighbors, I’m still new here. But one of the things I noticed almost immediately after moving here is that Houston is full of porches like that. They belong to people who leave before sunrise, work all day in the heat, and come home tired enough that an hour outside with family feels like a luxury.
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Those people built this city.
Some were born here. Some weren’t.
By seven o’clock in the morning, while many of us are answering our first email or wondering whether we have enough coffee left, thousands of Houstonians have already been at work for hours. Roofers. Electricians. Nurses. Landscapers. Welders. Truck drivers. Framers. Concrete crews.
Construction workers, especially, have a habit of disappearing into the background. You notice the finished neighborhood. You don’t usually think about the people who stood outside in August putting it together.
According to his family, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did that for 35 years.
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I stopped reading for a moment when I got to that number.
Thirty-five years is long enough to raise children into adulthood. Long enough to build a business. Long enough to become the person everyone calls when they need work done. Long enough for the alarm clock to become part of who you are.
Whatever happened on that Houston street Tuesday morning is now being investigated. It should be. There are serious questions, and serious questions deserve careful answers instead of quick conclusions.
I have no interest in pretending I know facts that investigators are still trying to determine.
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But there are facts that don’t seem to be in dispute.
Three sons lost their father.
Workers lost the man who gave them jobs.
A porch is going to stay empty.
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As lawyers, we spend our careers talking about damages.
Those words are necessary. They’re also sterile. They have to be. The law needs language that can fit inside court filings.
Real life sounds like a son remembering the porch where his father listened to music after work.
That detail tells me infinitely more about this man than almost anything else I’ve read.
The story also reminded me how complicated life can be for immigrant families in this country.
Not politically complicated.
The hope that maybe next year things will become a little more settled.
The determination to keep working while trying to build something that lasts.
Whether someone’s family arrived generations ago or much more recently, most people understand that feeling. Nearly all of us can point to someone in our own family tree who left somewhere else because they believed tomorrow could be better than yesterday.
It’s also a very American one.
I found myself reading the mayor’s response. I couldn’t pull myself away from the family’s GoFundMe page.
Not because I was looking for another fact.
Because I wanted to know how they described the man they had lost.
They wrote about someone known for giving people a chance to work. Someone who treated others fairly. Someone who believed that if another man knocked on his door looking for work, he should probably leave with a job.
Maybe that’s why this story has stayed with me.
Not because it fits neatly into anyone’s politics.
It’s about the ordinary routines that quietly become the architecture of a life until one day they disappear.
There will be investigations. There should be.
There will almost certainly be arguments. There already are.
I don’t have much to add to either of those conversations.
There is a family in Houston trying to figure out what tomorrow looks like without the man who spent 35 years getting up before dawn.
If you have the ability to help them through the GoFundMe established in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s memory, I hope you’ll consider doing so.
There will be plenty of time for people to debate.
Right now, a family needs neighbors.
Amanda Demanda, Esq., is the founder of Amanda Demanda Injury Lawyers and a nationally recognized trial attorney with a focus on serious and catastrophic commercial truck accident litigation. She currently serves as president of the Miami-Dade Trial Lawyers Association.