By Karen Gleason
Rosemary Gutierrez’s home has become, in part, a shrine to the memory of her murdered daughter, Amanda Riojas.
Gutierrez on Monday hosted a candlelight vigil to honor her daughter’s memory. Before the vigil, Gutierrez spoke to the 830 Times about her daughter.
Riojas was born in Del Rio Feb. 3, 1992. She was the youngest of Gutierrez’s four children, all daughters.
Gutierrez remembers Riojas – “my baby” – as a happy-go-lucky child.
Gutierrez and some of her children were migrant workers, traveling to Illinois to can green beans.
“We would go with a man from Del Rio who would take us up there, and they had a place to stay. My two oldest stayed here with my mom, and it was Amanda and her next-older sister Sabrina who always went with me,” she said.
Gutierrez said she worked in Illinois for two years and also worked on Texas farms.
Migrant farm work was one of the ways Gutierrez, who is divorced, provided for her daughters.
“I struggled to make ends meet,” she admitted freely. “I did everything I could to give them what they needed.”
Once, she even resorted to shoplifting because she wanted shoes for the children.
“That’s something I really regret doing, but I did it for the children,” Gutierrez said.
She said Amanda was happy until she went to school. There, Gutierrez said, Amanda was often bullied and teased for being overweight.
“I ended up taking her out of school and putting her in charter, but she ended up getting kicked out of there,” Gutierrez said with a sad shake of her head.
Amanda only completed the eighth grade, and then got pregnant with the first of her five children.
After Riojas’ murder, Gutierrez took in her daughter’s children, eventually adopting all five.
“Sometimes they get mad at me, because I don’t let them do a lot of things. I tell them, ‘Some day you’re going to thank me,’ because I tell them, ‘You live under my roof, you live under my rules,’” she said, admitting she is a strict disciplinarian.
She called all of them “very good kids,” who help her a great deal.
Gutierrez said in the years before her death, Amanda struggled with depression and was on disability.
“That’s how she supported herself. She would also make apples and tacos tapatios that she would sell. She was a really good cook,” Gutierrez said.
She recalled she began to worry when Amanda rapidly lost weight and began hanging out with a girl Gutierrez learned was using drugs.
“That was a red flag, and I really started worrying about Amanda,” Gutierrez said.
She said she confronted her daughter about her rapid weight loss.
“I told her, ‘I know that you’re not exercising to lose that weight. I know you’re doing other things.’ And she would say no, no, but then one day she came to me once, after CPS got involved because of the kids, and she told me, ‘I’m dirty,’ and she told me she was hooked on something called ice,” Gutierrez said.
She took Amanda to seek treatment for the addiction was told Amanda could get a bed.
But Amanda, unable to face the prospect of sobriety, fled before she was admitted to a treatment program.
The second time Amanda agreed to enter treatment, she fled again.
“I guess it was just too hard for her to just. I saw she wanted to change, but it was just the drugs that wouldn’t let her,” Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez said Amanda has once again pledged to get clean shortly before her murder
“I told her, ‘Amanda, if you don’t get the help, I don’t want you stopping by the house no more, because if CPS sees you here, they’re going to take away the kids,’ so for three weeks before her death, I didn’t see her,” Gutierrez said, breaking down in tears.
She was at home when her daughter Sabrina called her.
“She told me, ‘Mom, Mom, Amanda got shot, and I’m going to the hospital’,” Gutierrez said, adding the call came in about 7 or 8 p.m.
“I took off to the hospital, and I was hoping it’s a leg or it’s an arm, but once I get there, I told them I wanted to see her, and they were like, you can’t see her because her face dropped from the shot. And the doctors told me she didn’t want to die, because her heart was still beating. Her brain was gone, but her heart didn’t want to give up,” Gutierrez said, weeping with the memory.
She then made one of the hardest decisions of her life.
“I knelt down for like 45 minutes in a room they had me in, and they told me, ‘Ma’am, your daughter’s gone, but her heart is still good. Do you want to donate the organs?’ And I ended up donating them, because her heart didn’t want to give up. I just didn’t want to let her go, because that was my baby.
“I didn’t want to be selfish, and I thought, there’s probably somebody out there praying just this hard for an organ, and as a mother, I just couldn’t be selfish,” Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez also recalled her thoughts when she learned her daughter had been murdered.
“I was very angry because she had already taken this guy to the house, and the moment I saw him, it was just this gut feeling that I didn’t like him, and she told me, ‘Oh no, mom, he’s a good person, he’s gone through a lot in his life,’ and I told her I just didn’t trust him and told her to be careful, but she just laughed,” Gutierrez said.
She said she learned Evans had just gotten out of prison a few months before he allegedly shot her daughter and said her daughter and Evans had dated briefly. When Evans told her he had been seeing someone else, Amanda told him she, too, planned to move on.
Sabrina told her Amanda had planned to finally go into treatment May 1 and on April 27, she and Amanda planned to put her belongings into storage in preparation for Amanda’s stay in treatment.
Gutierrez said Sabrina told her Evans became angry when he learned Amanda planned to move on with her life.
There are both state and federal charges pending against Evans, who is currently in federal custody, District Attorney Suzanne West said this week.
West said Evans was arraigned in state district court here on Monday. She said there was no docketing schedule yet for the case. If the state case against Evans goes to trial, the trial could be set for the fall of 2022, she said.
West said she has assisted Gutierrez’s family in being aware of the court dates set for Evans so they can be present at those proceedings.
