BIDDEFORD — Monday afternoon was supposed to be Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s time with his 3-year-old-daughter, Dulce.
“I don’t have the strength to tell her her father isn’t coming, that she can’t hug him anymore or tell him, ‘Papi, I love you,’” Guerrero’s wife, Martha Karolina Rojas Alvarez, said Thursday afternoon.
Guerrero did everything to see his wife happy. He had dreams of growing into “little old people” with his wife, she said.
But the dream he held closest was to be a father.
That dream was shattered Monday morning, when a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fired at least four rounds through the windshield of the car Guerrero was driving, killing the 25-year-old Colombian man.
Alvarez, 23, spoke publicly at a news conference Thursday afternoon for the first time since her husband was killed.
Guerrero was working legally in the U.S., said Benjamin Gideon, an attorney retained by the family, and had an active asylum case, according to a friend. He arrived in the U.S. three years ago.
Daniela Durán Guerrero, the victim’s sister, and Keyko Torres, a translator with the immigrant advocacy group Presente! Maine, flanked Alvarez as Gideon spoke.
She clutched a typed statement as she prepared to eulogize her husband. It tremored between her fingers, red manicured nails contrasting against the printer paper and her pleated white blouse.
At times, Daniela wrapped an arm around Alvarez’s slim frame.
Her husband was, first and foremost, a family man.
“Every morning, my daughter would wake up and call out to Papá to tell him she was awake and had slept well,” Alvarez said.
In his hometown of Bucaramanga, Guerrero loved to ride bikes with his father, said Julio Mosquera, 39, a friend for more than a decade. Mosquera spoke to the Portland Press Herald via text messages in Spanish.
Together Guerrero and his father would traverse by bicycle their neighborhood in Bucaramanga, and the outlying mountains.
“He was a wonderful son, and I don’t know why they did that to him,” Omar Durán, Guerrero’s father, told the Spanish-language news outlet Telemundo.
Guerrero was shot by David Brouillette, an ICE agent working to execute an arrest warrant Monday morning. Guerrero was not the target of the warrant, officials have confirmed.
Security cameras and witnesses captured the moments following the shooting on video.
His killing has been denounced as murder by the Colombian president.
Alvarez described her husband as dependable and contagiously happy. The family was always together, according to their local mail carrier.
Wendy, an asylum-seeker who asked only to be identified using her first name due to fears for her own safety, found Guerrero’s connection with her high-needs disabled son remarkable.
“The way that he interacted with my son was really beautiful,” Wendy recalled.
Guerrero called him “My little king,” she said.
Although he worked two jobs, delivering groceries and cleaning at a veterinary office, Guerrero never wanted Dulce to think he didn’t have time for her, Alvarez said.
They went to the park together every afternoon. He bought her popsicles at the grocery store a few blocks from their house.
“From the moment he held her in his arms and held her tiny hand, he never let her go,” Alvarez said.