The Boy I Remember

By M.E. Avila

Twenty-nine years have passed since the West French Place massacre, but when I think of Christopher Tobias, August 1997 does not feel very far away. Christopher was someone I had a middle school crush on. To the world, his name became one of five listed in news reports about one of San Antonio’s most notorious crimes. To those of us who knew him, he was not just a name, a victim, or a young man described as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a person we remembered from school, someone with a face, a personality, friends, and a life that should have continued.

I don't think I've ever seen so many young people mourning before. We grew up in the 1990s, and those years could be rough. Violence was not something we knew only through the news. It existed in our neighborhoods and touched lives around us. But we had not experienced death like this. We had not experienced the sudden and brutal loss of one of our own, a good kid, someone like Chris. We were still young ourselves, trying to understand how someone we knew could suddenly be gone. His death showed us how quickly violence could take someone and how widely one loss could ripple through an entire community.

KSAT journalist Marilyn Moritz covered the killings, arrests, trials, and convictions connected to the West French Place massacre. Years later, she reflected on the brutality of the crime and the fact that some of the victims were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. What happened was gun violence, but it was also tied to a larger conflict within the Texas Mexican Mafia. Christopher was not at the center of that conflict. He was a young man who entered a home without knowing he was walking into something far more dangerous. That distinction matters because the circumstances of the massacre should never define Christopher or suggest that he belonged to the violence that took his life.

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All these years later, the details are still difficult to revisit. The brutality of what happened is almost impossible to reconcile with the boy I remember. News stories understandably recount the crime, the mafia conflict, the arrests, and the convictions, but those facts cannot hold the fullness of the lives that were lost. They cannot capture the families who had to keep living afterward, the young people who attended a funeral far too soon, or the memories that remained with us long after the reporters and cameras moved on.

At the time, I did not have the language to describe what witnessing that grief was doing to me. I did not understand trauma, the lasting effects of community violence, or how one act could alter so many lives. I only knew that something had changed. Looking back, I can see how profoundly this experience shaped me. It influenced my advocacy, my commitment to helping others, and the work I have devoted to strengthening and supporting communities. It taught me that violence is never contained to a single moment or location. Its effects continue through families, schools, friendships, and neighborhoods, often carried quietly for generations.

I would never reduce Christopher’s life or death to a lesson for me. His life mattered entirely on its own. But knowing him, losing him, and witnessing so many young people grieve changed the way I understood community. It helped form the part of me that believes people should not be left to carry tragedy alone. It is part of why I have spent my life advocating for others, helping communities navigate difficult circumstances, and working to ensure that people are seen as human beings rather than cases, statistics, or names in a news story.

Christopher is buried behind my grandparents. Whenever I am there, the distance between childhood and the present seems to disappear. I am reminded that he has rested near people I love for all these years, while those of us who knew him grew older and lived the years he was never given. There is something especially painful about standing among those graves and realizing how much time has passed while a part of the memory remains frozen in 1997.

On August 11, 2026, it still seems like yesterday. Perhaps some losses are not meant to be gotten over. We learn to carry them differently, but they remain part of who we are and how we understand the places that raised us. Christopher deserves to be remembered for more than the mafia conflict and gun violence that surrounded his death. I remember him as the boy I once had a crush on, as a good kid whose life mattered, and as part of a generation of West Side children who learned far too early that violence does not end when the crime scene is cleared. It lives on in families, friendships, neighborhoods, and in the hearts of those who still remember.