Today, Congressman Joaquin Castro (TX-20), DNCC 2020 Speaker and Marked by COVID Co-Founder Kristin Urquiza, Fiana Tulip, originally of Brownsville, TX, Rose Rangel of Brownsville, and Christopher C. Garcia of San Antonio joined together to tell their families’ stories and discuss the experience of losing a loved one to coronavirus.
Their stories had several common threads – the pain of losing a loved one, the helplessness of not being able to be with their family in their last moments, and the frustration of knowing that their loss could have possibly been prevented if the Trump Administration had done more to protect those most at risk.
See what they had to say about their stories:
“Alice went into the hospital, she was 78. She went into the hospital on my Dad’s 80th birthday on June 14th of this year. And that was the last time he saw her, when he dropped her off at the hospital because they wouldn’t let him in,” Congressman Joaquin Castro said of his step-mother, Alice Guzman. “The Trump Administration and the President, I think, responded in some ways devoid of thinking about people’s human suffering and what his response would do. He was careless with his language – unnecessarily careless with his language – and here we are now.”
“I was vocal about my dad’s passing from the very beginning – that this was needless and preventable,” said Kristin Urquiza, DNCC 2020 speaker and Marked by COVID co-founder. “At the end of May when the state of Arizona reopened, the governor went on a press tour to basically encourage people to get back to life as normal. He is on record saying if you do not have an underlying health condition, you’re safe out there. Go out, go shopping, meet up with friends. My dad was a supporter of the governor. He was a supporter of the President. And he did what we are trained to do. In times of crisis, it is our social order to follow the directions of people in charge. And that’s what he did. And for that he paid with his life.”
“My mom was a Hispanic respiratory therapist in Dallas and she had the biggest smile on her face all the time. She loved her children, she loved her friends, she loved her family, and she absolutely adored her new granddaughter,” said Fiana Tulip. “I didn’t get to speak with her to say goodbye. I didn’t get to tell her I love her. And I didn’t get to tell her I was proud of her for still going into work even though the Governor of Texas, the Lieutenant Governor, the Trump Administration were doing nothing to protect her.”
“[My dad] inspired me to become a mechanical engineer even though he was a high school dropout,” said Rose Rangel. “My sister got sick and then they all lived in the same household and that’s how my mom and my dad got sick. That’s a thing in the Rio Grande Valley. There’s a lot of multi-generational families living together. On July 11th my dad got intubated and on July 12th he passed away … There’s just so much more that could be done for the Rio Grande Valley and because of that experience I want to fight for those people – not only for them to get better resources but also to commemorate the dead.”
“I lost my dad, Carlos Garcia, to COVID. He was a very generous man. If you needed help, he was there for you, you could count on him. In December, he had just retired from over 25 years at the housing authority, so he was finally getting a chance to enjoy his years of hard work,” said Chris Garcia. “It’s frustrating because all of this was completely preventable, had leadership just done the right things at the right times. We knew this was contagious. The CDC, there was a plan for pandemics. The CDC had told us what to do and that’s all we needed leadership to do, is just to keep people quarantined until the numbers went down, until the numbers went away. Other countries were able to do it. It’s so frustrating.”