It was this misfortune that distressed Zambrano-Montes in the days before he and police in the town of Pasco clashed in February, in a confrontation that ended with officers firing a total of 17 bullets, hitting Zambrano-Montes several times and killing him. He was unarmed but was accused of pelting police with rocks.
His killing is now cited by family and Latino activists as another national example of officers using excessive lethal force against unarmed men, often minority men.
The police shooting of Zambrano-Montes, 35, now haunts his family, due in no small measure to how the hail of police bullets was captured on videos and posted on YouTube by bystanders.
A migrant’s journey
“Toño,” as loved ones called him, was one of 16 children, and he migrated to the United States about 10 years ago to join other relatives and harvest food on farms, said his mother, Agapita Montes.
That police fired 17 bullets at one of her 16 children leaves the mother aghast, she said.
“My son was a happy person, a hard worker and he got along with his siblings,” the mother said last week in an interview with CNN en Espanol shortly after a funeral service for her son at Pasco’s Saint Patrick Catholic Church.
“I had not seen him in 10 years, but I would talk to him over the phone,” said the mother, who traveled to Pasco from her rural home in the central Mexican state of Michoacán for her son’s funeral.
“I felt good that he was here. He was happy, and as a mother that was good for me,” she said.
It was at a funeral home where the 60-year-old Montes saw her son for the first time in a decade.
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According to the group, the federal prosecutor’s office will provide remedies and suggestions to Pasco police on their practices and procedures.
Burial to be in Mexico’s mountains
For now, Zambrano-Montes’ mother has taken control over her son’s body, which she plans to send to Mexico for burial on a little ranch called Pomaro in the Michoacán municipality of Aquila, she said.
The former wife isn’t contesting the mother’s control over Zambrano-Montes’ body, said Herrmann, attorney for the former wife.
The plot is near where the mother and her family live, in the mountains far from people. In fact, they must walk a good distance just to go shopping, Montes said.
His burial has been delayed because the mother commissioned an autopsy on her son in Florida, conducted this past week, and she has ordered more tests on his remains.
His grave will mark the end to a long journey.
He came to the United States looking for his own American dream, Zambrano-Montes’s family said.
But he left the world through what his family says is a continuing nightmare.
CNN en Espanol’s Jaqueline Hurtado reported from Pasco. CNN’s Michael Martinez wrote and reported from Los Angeles.
