Daughters Remember Mother Killed in Eva's Place Shooting

Red and blue lights flashed in Yvette Gonzalez’s rearview mirror on Super Bowl Sunday, the wail of the siren steadily approaching as the officer zipped past her vehicle and turned toward Eva’s Place bar.

Driving her brother home to make curfew, the siblings instinctively begin to worry about their mother, who had headed to the bar at noon that Sunday.

“I go and pass by the bar going down 11^th St., we see the [lights] and then we see the tape,” Gonzalez recalled. “My brother had to be home at a specific time, so I went to drop him off first and I told him I’d go back and check.”

Rolling her windows down and trying to get someone’s attention, Gonzalez noticed a woman exiting the bar.

“I honestly can’t remember her name, but I can remember her face, though,” she said quietly. “It’s a face I’ll never forget. She walks out and I’m asking her, ‘Can you tell me what happened? My mom works at the bar.’ She told me, ‘Who’s your mom? What’s her name?’ I told her the name and she gave me this blank-faced expression. It was a face I’ll never forget. She told me, ‘It was your mom that got shot. She’s at Shannon, get there.’”

Yvette picked up her phone and frantically dialed the numbers of her two other sisters, Julianna and Dianna, and contacted her brothers Alfonso and Jose, as she drove to Shannon Medical Center.

Already en route as she relayed what happened, Yvette was the first to arrive, but she wouldn’t receive any information at first and waited on her siblings in the family room.

“The detective had showed us an ID that was on my mom at the time that belonged to a different woman,” Yvette said. “He said, ‘This is the ID we found on the victim’. So we already had that sense of relief, like ‘Ok, it’s not her.’”

The detective continued to ask questions about their mother, inquiring about identifying features that may help rule her out as the victim of the shooting. Yvette told the detective about a tattoo she’d gotten her mother roughly two years prior that depicted a rose and the name Vasquez on her chest.

“The next time he came back, it was the pastor of the church or something like that and officer Heronema. I remember him well because he used to do security at Central,” Yvette said. “He’s the one that came in and told me and my sisters that it was my mother and she had passed.”

The news brought shock to the family, who couldn’t believe that their mother’s life had been taken so abruptly. They had all been very close, and none of them was prepared for the tragic loss.

“We all—I think we had all spoken to her that Sunday,” Julianna said. “To have just spoken to her and then for her to be gone in an instant was unbelievable and it was hard to accept that it had happened. Like Yvette said, she loved all of us. She cared about all of us. There wasn’t a day that went by that she [didn’t] call us.”

Bertha Vasquez was 51 years old when Jason Scott Little fired several rounds at Eva’s Place on Feb. 1 and hit her in the chest with a bullet. She was a mother to five children, three girls and two boys, and had 10 grandkids, nine of which are living.

On the day that she was killed, both Julianna and Dianna were ill. Knowing her mother had a penchant for home remedies, Julianna called her that afternoon to ask what she should take for a stomach bug. It was the last conversation they ever had.

“She told me to go buy some chamomile tea,” Julianna remembered. “She said, ‘Go make you some of that, and later on when I get off, I’ll call you, and if you still don’t feel good, I’ll make something for you.’ That was the last conversation I had, that she was supposed to call and check up on me if I was feeling better, and now it’s never coming.”

Dianna had also been talking to her mother about an illness, and recalled laughing with Bertha over the phone as they chatted about a time that she had gotten sick as a teenager. As they talked, her mother asked her if she’d be coming to San Angelo to visit on Feb. 18, the birthday of Dianna’s deceased son.

“That was her very first grandson,” Dianna explained. “That was tragic, too. That was 15 years ago and she’s never forgotten him. Not a year goes by [that we don’t] we all go to the cemetery for his birthday…that was the last phone call that I had with her, a couple of days before Sunday.”

Bertha had a strong relationship with her grandchildren, Dianna explained, and was particularly fond of cooking meals for the whole family and packing them into her small, one bedroom apartment.

“Tapatios was her favorite thing to make,” Julianna said. “When she and my dad were married, she cooked every single day, so when they divorced, we all kind of missed it. These past years she’s been cooking and we all love and enjoy it. It takes us back to when we were little, you know, and she’d cook and the whole house would smell like food.”

“She just wanted to be surrounded by family,” Yvette added. “She didn’t care about the mess, she didn’t care about how much food she had to make, she was just glad everybody was there.”

Grandchildren meant the world to Bertha, her daughters said, and she always kept quarters and change on hand to give to the little ones when she saw them. The kids have been struggling with the death of their grandmother, but Dianna has been keeping her memory alive.

“Dianna ended up keeping her purse,” Julianna said. “One thing my mom would always do when we would go see her is she would collect change, and you know kids would see change and want money, so she would give them quarters all the time. So Dianna kept her purse and she said, ‘Tita left y’all some money’, and she gave them quarters.”

When she died, Bertha Vasquez was suffering from an illness brought on by alcoholism that doctors predicted would soon claim her life. She’d been given a range of two to 12 months to live, but hadn’t shared much about her ailments with her children, preferring not to burden them with the sorrowful news.

Despite knowing that their mother wouldn’t be around much longer, none of the girls were prepared for her death on Feb. 1, all believing they had more time.

“You almost wish that if she was sick that she would have left in that way and it not be so tragic and sudden and unexpected,” Julianna said. “It’s hard not to be angry that she left that way. You question God, like why this way?”

“I wasn’t angry at first,” Dianna sobbed. “I wasn’t angry at the person at all because I felt that mother wasn’t going to through any pain with her disease, so I was content. But then days go by and I’m still waiting for that phone call from her. The anger inside has grown…”

Bertha Vasquez was buried on Feb. 7 at Lawnhaven, caddy-corner to the grave of her first grandson. In her absence, her daughters agree that the hardest part will be all the things she’ll miss: Yvette and Julianna’s weddings, watching their kids grow up, birthdays, grandchildren’s first dates and school plays.

“For me, it’s all the things she’s going to miss,” Julianna said. “I don’t plan on being single forever, so [I’ll miss her] the day I do get married, my niece’s sweet 15, Yvette, when she gets married and has kids. We all knew that Yvette’s kids were going to be the most spoiled kids by her…”

“We’re going to miss everything from her laugh to her sneeze,” Yvette said.

“Her sneeze,” Julianna laughed. “She would sneeze and sneeze and sneeze like 10 times in one sitting. She had bad allergies, so once she sneezed one time, you knew she was going on for like 10 more times.”

Through tears, the sisters recalled their mother as a fun-loving and upbeat person who loved to sing karaoke, dance and cook. Her death at the hands of a stranger has left all three with questions that may never be answered, chief among them, why?

“We haven’t heard anything other than he got arrested,” Julianna said. “We don’t know why he did it. We don’t know anything other than he was the shooter. Who was he trying to hurt? Obviously you can’t just shoot somewhere and not expect to hurt someone. I’ve never seen him before, and that was, I think, our fear: that he was going to be someone we know or that she had talked about.”

Jason Scott Little was arrested after the shooting on the opposite side of town. He had switched cars and was driving drunk with the murder weapon under the seat. Little has been charged with first-degree murder and if convicted, could face 5-99 years in prison. Life is what her daughters would like to see; a life behind bars for the life he took.

“We loved our mother very much,” Yvette said. “She meant the world to all of us. We’re going to miss her dearly and the affection she showed to all of us. Her phone calls. Just knowing that she was there and that we could call her if we wanted to.”