A teen feud on Instagram, a fight outside Whataburger, and a devastating burst of violence
Erica Silva is crying at her grandson’s 1st birthday party.
It’s hot out, mid-September in North Texas. The sun is beating onto an open field, which is peppered right now with the ornaments of a party. Folding tables covered in plastic tablecloths. A cooler of drinks nearby. A blow-up bouncy slide, purple and towering, with a water-filled pool at the bottom.
Erica almost didn’t come today. It was a hard decision — not because of her little grandson, whom she adores, but because of her son, the baby’s father.
In the end, Erica made the 90-minute drive from Oklahoma and brought her 17-year-old son Zechariah Trevino with her. She carried him out in a silver urn, adorned with necklaces — one with a cross on it, another with a “Z” pendant. She set him on a round table, atop a blue tablecloth. She put his photo next to the urn, where someone left a plate of food for him, a plastic fork sticking out of a pile of spaghetti and meatballs.
Erica wanted Zechariah here, at the birthday party for the son he never met.
It’s been over a year and a half since a social media feud erupted into gunfire outside a Whataburger restaurant where Zechariah worked, across the street from Fort Worth’s Paschal High School. Zechariah was killed; his cousin, Mia Dominguez, was wounded. Three teen boys were eventually sentenced, two of them with more than decade-long imprisonments.
In the wake of that violence in January 2023, all of the families involved have struggled to make sense of the world they now live in. Mia spent days in the hospital and was left with a scar across her abdomen. Zechariah’s girlfriend gave birth to his son and now works two jobs to support her and her baby. And Erica has trudged through waves of grief that are painfully familiar to her, echoing the shooting death of Zechariah’s father years ago.
At the same time, Zechariah and Mia’s extended family has been torn in two. Several of them haven’t really spoken in months, and they sat apart during court hearings as if the other side didn’t exist.
And the families of the boys who went to prison are grappling with their loss, too — a future where their sons may not be free for years or decades.
It’s impossible to chart all of the repercussions of those few moments of violence in the Whataburger parking lot. But it is a tragedy that has become increasingly familiar across the U.S.
Since 2020, firearm injuries have surpassed car crashes as the No. 1 cause of death among adolescents In 2022 alone, more than 2,500 youth were killed by gunfire, including about 300 in Texas. Tarrant County has been ahead of national trends. Here, gun injuries became the leading cause of adolescent deaths in 2017.
Behind each statistic, there’s a trail of destruction that can’t be captured in the numbers.
“You want to go back and fix everything, as a mother,” Erica said. “But then, there’s no more to be fixed.”
‘That’s how much can happen in two minutes’
The fight started on social media.
Mia posted an Instagram story referencing her older sister Brisa, who had overdosed and died in 2022. Mia partially blamed one of the boys with her sister that day. Zechariah shared his cousin’s post on his own Instagram account, Mia said.
Later, Zechariah and Mia walked from Paschal High School to the Whataburger on West Berry Street to pick up Zechariah’s paycheck. They were waiting for a ride when two cars pulled up.
In one car were three boys who Mia and Zechariah knew, and the boys were apparently outraged by Mia’s Instagram story.
According to Mia, Daniel Reed got out of the car and showed her a gun. In response, she pushed him and in the process — Mia says this part was an accident, and Daniel’s mother says it wasn’t — also hit him in the mouth with the car door.
Daniel then fired the first shot, hitting Mia once in the stomach. Isaiah Nunez then shot Mia again and also shot and killed Zechariah. The two shooters and the victims were all 17 years old. Jose De La Cruz, who drove the other two boys to and from the Whataburger, was 16.
The Fort Worth Police Department withheld records in this case because those involved were all minors. Investigators did not agree to interviews for this story. A spokesperson for Fort Worth ISD also declined to set up interviews about the shooting and said the district wanted to focus on more positive stories.
Mia said that her grandma, who was picking up her and Zechariah that day, was only a few minutes away when she and Zechariah were shot.
“That’s how much can happen in two minutes,” Mia said.
‘I woke up crying’
Mia doesn’t remember it hurting, at first.
She remembers lying in the parking lot. She remembers a stranger helping her call her mother — it was the second time in a year that her mother got a call like that about one of her daughters. After that, she doesn’t remember a lot, until she awoke in pain.
“When I woke up, I woke up crying,” she said. “I didn’t feel nothing when I did get shot. I felt it in the hospital every morning when I woke up.”
The shooting, and the surgery afterward, left Mia with a scar that runs nearly down the center of her torso. Her belly button ring — once centered — now looks slightly off-center. An optical illusion, she said, from the way the scar curves around her abdomen. There are marks on either side of the scar from the 11 staples they gave her at the hospital.
She was initially sad about the scar but now, she said, she wears crop tops again and doesn’t hide her abdomen.
There are some things, though, that Mia simply won’t do anymore: She won’t eat at Whataburger, and she won’t drive down Berry Street.
She’s in school to become a medical assistant now, in part because of her time in the hospital. And she’s trying, with some success, not to let herself get riled up as much.
Much of Zechariah’s side of their family blames Mia for the shooting. In the aftermath, Mia and Zechariah’s extended family ruptured. Corina Camacho, who was Zechariah’s girlfriend and is the mother of his child, has aligned with Erica, Zechariah’s mother.
Mia doesn’t agree with Erica’s stance that she’s to blame.
“She can’t blame me because I’m not the one that pulled the trigger,” Mia said.
Mia hasn’t spoken much with Corina, her former best friend, or her aunt Erica since the shooting. She hasn’t met the baby.
Both Mia and Corina, in separate interviews, described the aftermath of the shooting as a twin loss: first, the death of their beloved Zechariah, and second, the rift that cost them their friendship.
“Mia was ... she was the only friend I talked to, I lived with her, she was my everything,” Corina said.
For Mia, the death of her sister Brisa the previous year makes it a triple loss.
“I don’t come home to Zech, I don’t come home to my sister, I don’t come home to Corina,” Mia said. “I don’t come home to nobody.”
‘I know he’s talking God’s ear off right now’
When Corina looks at her infant son, she sees traces of Zechariah.
It’s in the way her baby boy smiles at her, she says, and the way he folds his hands over his belly while he sleeps, and in the freckle in the exact same spot on his forehead.
Corina recently turned 20. She has survived the last year and a half by focusing on her pregnancy and the birth of Zechariah Emilio, whom she calls Emilio. He has been the center of her world, her lighthouse in an ocean of grief and pain.
Corina said she hadn’t been sure she wanted kids, until she saw how excited Zechariah was about being a dad. When she found out she was pregnant, he was elated. Zechariah, ever the outgoing chatterbox, talked endlessly about his plans as a father: park play dates and trips to the Dallas aquarium. He was excited one moment for the possibility of a boy, and the next moment for the possibility of a girl.
Through his enthusiasm, his happy chatter, Corina saw a vision for their future as a family. Corina doesn’t think Zechariah’s chattiness has ended — it just isn’t with her anymore.
“I know he’s talking God’s ear off right now,” Corina said. “God wanted that conversation, I guess.”
In some ways, Corina has bonded over the grief with Zechariah’s mother — in part because Erica has been in Corina’s shoes.
In 2005, Erica was 18 years old and pregnant with Zechariah when her 17-year-old boyfriend was killed in a drive-by shooting. Her testimony, she said, is what got one of her boyfriend’s killers a 50-year prison sentence.
Despite the eerily similar stories — a vicious cycle repeated almost word-for-word — Erica knows that she and Corina aren’t the same person. Their griefs are different, Erica said, and so is their outlook on the boys who killed Zechariah.
‘I will never, ever forgive them’
All the three of the teens charged in the shooting ended up taking plea deals.
Isaiah, who shot and killed Zechariah, was sentenced to 35 years in prison; Daniel, who shot Mia in the stomach, was sentenced to 13 years; and Jose, who drove the other two teens, was sentenced to four months in prison, plus 10 years of probation.
No one is happy with the sentences — not Zechariah and Mia’s family, who think the punishments were too light, and not the young defendants’ families, who think the justice system was too heavy-handed.
A spokesperson for the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office declined to make any of the prosecutors or other staff available for an interview for this story. In a statement that didn’t include any specifics of this case, she said that the DA’s office aims to arrive at plea deals that mirror what they believe a jury would do.
In court hearings after the sentences were read out, members of Zechariah and Mia’s families took the stand and talked about how the shooting had impacted them.
Corina spoke at the sentencings of Isaiah, who shot Zechariah, and Jose, who drove the other two boys. She said it was more difficult than she expected to face them, particularly Isaiah. In some ways, she wishes that the teens could tell her what they were thinking, why they did it — but she was also clear that she does not want any contact with them now.
Erica said that, when her own boyfriend was killed, she knew she would never forgive the boys who did it. With Zechariah, her anger is palpable and her desire for hard time is clear. Still, she alternates between saying that she’s already forgiven the boys, and conceding that one day she will. Forgiveness is on the table, albeit from a distance.
Corina doesn’t feel the same way, at least not for the boys who pulled the triggers on Mia and Zechariah.
“I will never forgive them. I will never, ever forgive them,” Corina said.
“I don’t think you can ever heal from losing somebody, you can’t ever fully heal,” she said. The “three boys definitely shot me, even though they didn’t physically, they definitely shot me.”
In an interview after the sentencings, Mia said the violence of that day changed her outlook on other people, in part because she knew the teens who shot her and her cousin.
“You can never really trust nobody,” she said. “When you go home at night and you’re in that room, you look around and nobody’s there but you. And that’s who got you, at the end of the day.”
‘I’m so destroyed’
Paul Nunez finds dimes on the ground everywhere he goes. Ever since his son Isaiah was arrested, dimes have appeared in his path.
He thinks it’s a sign that his son will be freed in 10 years, despite the 35-year sentence in the plea deal.
Isaiah’s parents seem tortured by their son’s involvement in the shooting, and by his long sentence.
Paul talks in roundabout tangents, peppered with pleas about his son’s humanity, his goodness. When Isaiah’s mother Natalie Cervantez talks about him, tears catch in the creases under her eyes.
Isaiah had struggled with his mental health for years. He was in and out of facilities, given diagnoses and prescribed medication. On the day of the shooting, though, Isaiah wasn’t on his meds, his parents said. They think he was self-medicating with street drugs, and they believe that he was paranoid at the time.
Paul had thought they were through the worst of it with Isaiah when he finished a stint at a treatment center shortly before the shooting.
Now, with his son in prison, Paul thinks he might be a little bit angry with God. During an interview, Paul pauses to yell hoarsely at the sky. “We pray to you, dude!” The sky does not respond.
“I’m so destroyed. I’m so destroyed in my belief,” Paul says.
Paul and Natalie’s grief is raw and fraught, a dense thing that fills the air when they talk about their son.
Isaiah initially agreed to an interview from prison but later decided against it. He said in an eMessage that he wishes he could change that day, and that he thinks about the shooting every day and night.
Paul and Natalie take it as a matter of fact that Isaiah did not get fair representation in court.
They didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer, they said, and the court-appointed attorney spoke to them infrequently and didn’t appropriately present Isaiah’s mental health history in court.
“She didn’t try for him at all,” Natalie said.
“The system is not broken, it’s corrupted.” Paul added. “She showed us how it is.”
Over the summer, Natalie called Zechariah’s mother, Erica, spilling out her grief over the phone.
Erica said she didn’t want to talk to her. What is there to say? Natalie can speak to her son over the phone, over video call. Erica’s son is in an urn.
‘He will come back to me one day’
Salillian Parker isn’t apologizing for her son’s role in the shooting.
Her son, Daniel, is the one who shot Mia in the stomach. Daniel’s plea deal sent him to prison for 13 years.
Salillian doesn’t condone what her son did. She’s angry at whoever provided Daniel and Isaiah access to guns — she said her son never told her where he got the gun — and she knows Daniel messed up. But her son didn’t kill Zechariah. In Salillian’s view, Mia bears some responsibility for knocking the car door into her son’s face.
“Something happened to my child, so I’m not apologizing,” she said. “Now the other little boy what was killed? I am so sorry for his mother. Her son shouldn’t have been killed, he shouldn’t have died. … But as far as the girl go, I don’t sympathize with her. You keep your hands to yourself. You hit my son first.”
The shooting — and the fallout — took a toll on Salillian.
When talking about her son in April, shortly after he was sentenced, Salillian cried off and on. She kept repeating that she didn’t know what to say. She’d been prescribed anxiety medication and was barely sleeping.
Salillian’s son has just begun his 13-year prison sentence, which means he may not be home until he’s past 30. The sentence still hits Salillian as an injustice. Like Isaiah’s parents, Salillian thinks her son’s public defense attorney phoned it in — in Daniel’s case, because he’s both poor and Black.
But now that her son is in prison, instead of the county jail, Salillian feels she can breathe again. Through daily eMessages and occasional calls, she can tell that her son is settled. He has a routine, he’s in school, he’s eating better. (Daniel responded to the Star-Telegrams’ eMessages but didn’t agree to an interview.)
When he started feeling better, so did Salillian.
Over the summer, she began cooking again. She made roast and cabbage and yams and black eyed peas and meat loaf and Daniel’s favorite, salmon croquettes. It had been a year since she’d cooked like that, she said.
“You have to have soul to cook that kind of food and when you are broken, you won’t get it right,” she said.
She laughs her loud laugh. She smiles, showing a gold grill across her front teeth.
“Knowing that I can see my son, hear his voice, and he will come back to me one day, that keeps me stable, because there are some mothers that won’t ever get their child back,” she said. “My son could’ve been on the other end of that barrel that killed the other little boy, but God has allowed me — and him — another opportunity to get it right.”
And now he has the time, Salillian said, to sort out his life and then come back home.
“Going to jail is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it saves your life.”
The birthday party
Erica holds her grandson in her arms as she races down the inflatable water slide at the baby’s birthday party.
She tries to shield him from the water at the bottom, but the splash is massive. There’s a moment of silence after they hit the water before baby Emilio shrieks. Corina and her friends rush over, gather around, coo over the crying baby.
Corina is a good mom, and Erica says she has no critique of her parenting. Corina appreciates Erica’s help and advice.
But it’s hard. Corina works two jobs, one in the morning and one in the evening, to pay for her apartment and bills. Erica feels disconnected — no one’s fault, just a byproduct of Zechariah being gone — and doesn’t always feel at home during events for the baby.
Erica had a panic attack in a Dollar General the other day. She had seen a toy piano and instinctively wanted to call Zechariah to ask if she should buy it for the baby. She realized all at once, again, that Zechariah had never met his own son.
A store employee tried to calm her down, Erica said, telling her over and over again that it was okay.
But that’s just the thing, Erica says as she retells the story. It wasn’t okay. Zechariah wasn’t okay.
At the birthday party, Erica’s grandson screams in her arms. She passes him off to a family member. She takes a sip of her Coke. Later, Corina will gather her family and friends around a Luca-themed cake, and they’ll sing happy birthday. Corina will take a scoop of icing and hold it to her baby boy’s lips.
And Zechariah, forever 17, will watch from inside a photo frame as his son turns 1.
This story was originally published November 22, 2024 at 5:45 AM.
