Francisco lived a peaceful life. He liked the rural area, where he and his family were tucked into the hills of the Valle de Sula. Francisco , his wife and his four kids shared a house with his parents. It was a safe place to raise his children, much safer than the city where he worked everyday. To support his family, Francisco would leave at 5 AM each day so his long commute would not make him late. He rode his bike each morning down the 2km dirt road until he would reach the paved highway into town. From there it was nearly 15kms into town. Six days a week Fransisco would make the trek into town, labor all day as a construction assistant and then at 5:30 PM he would bike the 17km home. After working 60 to 70 hours each week, he would be able to brink home nearly $55. If he could maintain steady work, that would mean that Francisco would earn nearly $1,000 more than the Gross National Income per capita of nearly $1, 700.
Francisco's wife had pleaded with her husband to take the bus. It would only cost him 60 cents each way, but for Francisco he knew that meant that almost 15 percent of his pay would be spent just getting to work each day. He finally convinced his wife that he preferred to ride his bike than having to walk the 2km road uphill to his family's home. For years Francisco had been able to keep steady work, unfortunately the Honduran rainy season meant that fewer construction jobs were planned during the winter months. Little by little he was saving money, even hoping to find some land to build a house and move his family out of his parent's house.
Then one Friday night Francisco did not make it home. His wife always worried about him, but he would sometimes stop and visit with friends or even stop in at a local bar on his way home. It was not until the frantic screams from her mother-in-law that she knew something had happened. A neighbor of Francisco's who was coming home from work as well was the first one to reach Francisco's family to tell him that he was dead, shot in the head not more than 20 feet from the entrance to the dirt road that would have taken him home. By the time his family got to the road, a group of people had already gathered around Francisco's body.
Francisco's family stayed at the side of the road for nearly three hours. Members of their extended family began to arrive and join the ever growing crowd of mourners and those with a morbid curiosity. The Police finally arrived to "secure the body." They cordoned off a small space around Francisco's body and began their "investigation." All the while the crowd grew and passing cars slowed to gander at the night's latest victim. No white sheet laid over the corpse, no body bag and in the end no coroner.
At first the police thought that the motive might have been robbery, since Francisco's shoes seemed to have dissapeared from his feet. One policeman though rejected that notion, suggesting that the dead man was most likely too poor to even own shoes. The family informed them though that he had left with a threadbare pair of tennis shoes in the morning, which someone must have taken off of him. Though, since Francisco's bike was still present they moved on to other theories. The official police "report" deemed that Francisco was a victim of a random drive by shooting. What they deemed as a common weekend activity in the area. According to the police, some people deem it sporting to get liquored up and to try and shoot people off of their bikes as the ride home from work. Whether that is the truth or not, Francisco's family will never know.
Unlike the United States, gun crimes in Honduras have a remarkably low conviction rate. The low rate must surely have something to do with the many cases of poor Hondurans that the police deem not worthy of a real investigation. Francisco's family was given the option of having the corpse transported to the morgue two hours away, where they would have to pay nearly $150 to get the body returned to them. Or the family could choose to pay the police $25 to immediately release the body to the family. No one had the $150, so the family paid the $25. The police finally drove off, leaving Francisco's body still resting beside the road with a bullet in his brain. His family then had to find someone with a pickup truck to take his body back to their house.
The next day Francisco was buried, less than 24 hours after having been shot. No autopsy was performed. Whether his death was even officially registered was not clear. Either way, no one was ever punished for the crime. Francisco's family believe that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the police suggested, a victim of a drive by "hunting incident" targeting the poor people who cannot afford to travel by car or bus home everyday.
Francisco's wife and children spent a large portion of the money he had saved up for the funeral and burial. What was left, was gone within a month. Francisco's parents kicked their daughter-in-law out of the house. Without Francisco around there were just too many mouths too feed and one too many daughter-in-laws in the house. Francisco and his family paid the ultimate price for his employment in the city. A 60 cent bus fare could have saved his life that day, but like many poor families public transportation on a daily basis is out of the realm of affordability.
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