It was the man who tended to the flowers on the campus of Queen of Peace Catholic Church in downtown who died in the bus stop hit-and-run accident near downtown
Mesa on Oct. 2.
It took Mesa police a couple days to identify the body of Jose Luis Velasco-Garcia, 61, because he was not a U.S. citizen and his family lives in
Mexico. ‘He is the one who maintained the roses in the little rose garden in front of the school,’ said Mike Evans, a science teacher for grades 6-8 at Queen of Peace School. During at least some of Sunday’s Masses, parishioners were informed that Velasco-Garcia was the victim. He had been associated with the parish for about 20 years.
Velasco-Garcia was waiting at the bus stop near Main Street and Horne at about 7 p.m. when a blue pickup truck apparently went out of control and leaped the curb and struck him. The impact sent his body into a parking lot in front of a Mexican restaurant, more than 30 feet from where he was hit. There were conflicting reports that bagged groceries that Velsaco-Garcia was holding at the time, then spilled across the ground, were carried off by others who showed onto the scene.
‘His roses and his flowers were the way that he served here at the parish, and now he is gone,’ said Evans, who has been coming to Queen of Peace since 1991. Often, he said, people’s passing is primarily a family thing, but here it is a whole faith community that has been affected by it.
‘There would be lots of times when he would be here before I got to school,’ he said. ‘I would get here for school, and he had worked in there for a couple of hours, especially when it was hot. There would be lots of times where he would be here when I would leave at the end of the day, so that that side of the building would be in the shade.’
This Wednesday, members of the National Junior Honor Society at Queen of Peace started a collection to help raise the money needed to send Velasco-Garcia’s remains to his Mexican village for burial.
‘It has just been a shock, and it has taken a while for everyone to realize who he was,’ Evans said. Meanwhile, a warrant with a $1 million cash bond has been issued for the suspected driver of the pickup, Alan Ricardo Flores-Ocon, 23. The GMC pickup involved in the fatal incident was found less than two miles from the accident scene with a white plastic grocery bag still stuck on its grill.
