Out of the shadows.(Evening)

Byline: Joline Gutierrez Krueger JGLENN@ABQTRIB.COM / 823-3603

Murder victims remembered

Families say their loved ones' lives were much more meaningful than the public was ever led to believe

Gilfred Chavez Jr. and Yvonne Garcia were bludgeoned to death in the dark alleys of the desperate, their murders occurring three years and four miles apart and further than that from public notice.

Little about their seemingly unrelated deaths in 2000 and 2003 was mentioned in the news, and what was reported, their families argued, was wrongly based on the distorted ramblings of the transient later sentenced for killing them.

Chavez and Garcia were not transients, not forgotten, their families said.

They were good people, they said.

They were people.

"Everyone got it wrong," said Garcia's daughter Elizabeth Perea, who has spent the two years since her mother's death in August 2003 reminding others of that. "My mother was not homeless. She was always there for her family. She mattered."

Gilfred Chavez Jr. had a home, too.

"He lived with us," said his mother, Priscilla Chavez, from that home in Los Lunas.

But in October 2000 he never came home again.

The memories come, though. But so do the unexpected gifts, the charitable deeds, the inner strength that spring so surprisingly from such tragedy.

That is the story the public should pay heed to, they said. Because on the desperate streets where murder …