Fort Worth man killed outside home ‘didn’t have problems with anybody,’ daughters say
Mirka Macias, 22, didn’t sleep well for some reason the night before her father was shot and killed outside of their home in east Fort Worth, waking up what felt like once on the hour.
Around 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 22, she awoke again, this time to the sound of a pop she didn’t yet recognize as gunfire and the screams of her mother.
Mirka and her older sister ran outside to find their father, Francisco “Panchito” Macias, a 49-year-old Mexican immigrant, lying in front of the pickup truck he drove every morning to his job as a forklift operator at Willbanks Metals. Their mother was crouched by his side, near the curb in the street, as blood spilled from a bullet wound in his head. She was saying, “Your dad — your dad,” Mirka remembers.
“I couldn’t do anything to help him,” Mirka said over the phone on Tuesday afternoon. “I tried to turn him around but he was just too heavy.”
Her sister, Cynthia Macias, 28, was the first to call 911 to say their father had been shot outside their home in the 5100 block of Anderson Street, around 5:30 a.m. She and Mirka called police four or five more times as each passing minute felt like it was dragging on, eventually starting CPR with the guidance of a dispatcher. When medics responded around 5:45 a.m., they told them he had a pulse, but it was weak.
Francisco was pronounced dead about a half hour later inside of Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office. Police said in an update on Monday the department is asking the public for help looking for three or four suspects believed to be responsible for the shooting.
The Macias family were at a candlelight vigil in front of their home on Saturday evening, organized by community activist and congressional candidate Carlos Quintanilla. A video on Quintanilla’s Facebook page shows dozens of people lining the block, holding up candles and sniffling underneath face masks. Melancholy music, sung in Spanish, plays from speakers.
Mirka, the mother to a 1-year-old daughter, said the turnout was uplifting but not surprising.
“Everyone in the neighborhood came and showed up because he never had any problems with any of our neighbors or anybody around here,” she said. “That’s why I know there’s no reason for anybody to just be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m just gonna go kill him this morning.’ I know he didn’t have any problems with anybody.”
The days since Francisco’s death have been tough on the whole family, the memory so fresh in their mind, according to Cynthia, who has a 6-year-old son. Their front yard, and the street in front of it, serve as a reminder of the incident and their unanswered questions.
“I can’t even walk outside my house because I can see him just laying there,” Cynthia said. “I can see my mom, still, screaming for help. I can see my sister running up and down the street. I can see myself running up and down the street, asking for help, holding the phone, just telling them to, ‘Hurry up, hurry up.’”
The sisters are pushing the police department for answers amid the pain and confusion of Francisco’s death, motivated by a strong community response to the seemingly random killing of a loved grandfather and father, and friend to many in his neighborhood.
Pancho is a common nickname for Mexican men with the name Francisco. But Mirka said their father, who was kind even to strangers, was known as Panchito because it’s “like with a little bit more love.”
Posts tagged #JusticeforPanchito have popped up across Facebook, mostly from concerned members of the Stop Six neighborhood where the shooting occurred. The Macias family and Quintanilla planned to meet with representatives from the police department on Wednesday, police confirmed.
Quintanilla told the Star-Telegram over the phone on Tuesday evening he knows Chief Ed Kraus, homicide investigators and an assistant city manager were set to be present at the meeting. He volunteered to help the family after the sisters reached out to him, he said, moved by their pleas that the crime has been ignored and of the brutal nature of the crime.
“Fort Worth should be shocked that that kind of behavior exists in Stop Six or in Fort Worth,” he said. “So that’s why I became involved.”
The congressional candidate, running as an Independent for the U.S. District 33 seat occupied by Democrat Marc Veasey, plans to make sure the city is investing the necessary resources into solving the crime, especially at a time of increased homicides in Fort Worth. At least five people were killed in separate shootings over the weekend, including two at a house party.
Cynthia said she would push police officials at the meeting to collect as many security videos related to the incident as possible and speak to more people.
“I just want them to help us find whoever did it,” she said. “It was four people, so I’m pretty sure someone knows something. There has to be something done.”
When asked if police had any comment Tuesday, Officer Daniel Segura, a department spokesman, said, “We are aware of their concerns and some of us will be in the meeting tomorrow.”
He didn’t answer a list of questions about the specific allegations raised by the sisters.
‘I just want them to do their job’
Thinking back on the morning her father died, Mirka said she has the feeling police weren’t treating their case with the urgency it deserved.
The various dispatchers on the phone with her and her sister kept telling them somebody was on the way, and it wasn’t until one of their final calls that someone told them how to begin CPR, Mirka said. Police arrived in a little more than 10 minutes, which she didn’t feel was a fast enough response time. She said the first officer to arrive began asking about who did it before going to provide CPR to her dying father.
She later showed them videos from security cameras her father had in the front of the home, and at this time said she heard officers refer to the house as as “gang-affiliated.” Any such designation, she said, would have been due to her 27-year-old ex-boyfriend, an ex-gang member who’s currently in prison. “I was like, ‘Excuse me, the gang member isn’t here anymore,’” she said.
“They automatically assumed that it’s gang-affiliated and that my dad was a gang member,” Mirka said. “They’re like, ‘Oh, well it’s just another gang member.’”
Her father, she said, was a hard worker and a loving family man who moved his family from Juarez to Texas about 17 years ago. Willbanks Metals, the company where he worked for the past four years, posted on Facebook that Francisco was “a beloved member of our Willbanks family and will be greatly missed.”
Though Francisco was soft-spoken, Cynthia said, he had a habit of big gestures of kindness, like when he bought flowers for a neighbor with children alone on Mother’s Day.
A GoFundMe set up to assist the family with paying for the funeral, which was held on Sunday, had raised more than $6,300 as of Tuesday evening.
Multiple people, including Mirka and Quintanilla, have taken to Facebook over the past week to call for justice, singling out the City of Fort Worth, the mayor and the police department. Quintanilla had been calling for people to meet outside of Betsy Price’s office on Wednesday to demand more answers, until he said in a post on Tuesday a meeting between police and the family had been set.
Segura, the police spokesman, pointed out on Tuesday that the department posted a bulletin on its social media channels Monday asking anyone with information on the shooting to come forward. The police bulletin said Francisco Macias was walking to his vehicle to leave for work when he was approached by the unknown suspects. After the shooting, the assailants fled the scene in a dark-colored vehicle.
Anyone who has knowledge of the crime or video evidence is asked to contact Detective C. Watson at 817-392-4327 or Crime Stoppers at 817-469-TIPS (8477).
Mirka feels police likely issued the appeal to the public “because of the pressure that we were putting on them.”
She still has no idea what happened on the morning of the shooting, she said, and has doubts that police have done enough. She walked around the block with her sister and her sister’s husband on Monday talking to neighbors and said many didn’t speak with detectives.
She feels there should be enough evidence, with the prevalence of street cameras, for police to identify suspects.
“I just want them to do their job,” Mirka said.
This story was originally published October 28, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
