A Son Woke Up Without His Father and Wants the World to Know Who Lorenzo Salgado Araujo Was

Ronaldo Salgado spent Tuesday waiting at a crime scene, hoping to hear something about his father. By Wednesday morning, the reality had settled in the way grief does, slowly at first and then all at once. He posted on Facebook that it was finally hitting him that his father was gone, and that the first thing he thought about was his mother. “Today is the first day without him for all of us,” he wrote, “and it is heartbreaking to know that my mom did not make lunch for my dad before going to work, the first time in their 30+ year marriage.”

His father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was a Mexican man who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years, working in construction to support his wife, Ronaldo and his two brothers. He was in the process of obtaining a work permit through the legal process when he died on Tuesday morning in Houston’s Magnolia Park neighborhood after an encounter with a federal immigration officer. He was on his way to pick up his workers.

Who Was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo

Ronaldo described his father in terms that have nothing to do with headlines or politics and everything to do with the kind of person Lorenzo Salgado Araujo actually was. “This is my father, a simple man, a family man,” he wrote. “Not someone crying for help on the floor as he bled. He just wanted to go to work and come back to us.”

The image he shared of his father in those posts was of someone who existed entirely outside the narratives being constructed around his death, a man whose daily life consisted of work, family and the routine of 30 years of marriage. The detail about his mother not making lunch landed with the kind of specificity that abstractions about loss never quite reach. It was a small thing, a daily ritual so embedded in the fabric of a long marriage that its absence became the first concrete proof that something had permanently changed.

Ronaldo was also direct about what his father deserved. “My father has been in this country for nearly 35 years, working in construction to provide for myself, my two brothers, and my mother,” he wrote. “He was in the process of obtaining his work permit through the legal process. He was on his way to work, picking up his workers. My father did not deserve this.”

What Comes Next

Ronaldo announced that he will speak at a press conference on Wednesday, July 8th at 10 a.m. at The Greater Coalition for Justice, located at 150 West Parker Road in Houston on the fifth floor, with the support of LULAC. He said he wants the world to know who his father was and how much he meant to his family. “I will be speaking at a press conference regarding my dad,” he wrote. “I want the world to know who my dad is and just how much he meant to all of us.”

He also asked for privacy and expressed that he did not want to see the videos and photographs that have been circulating online of his father’s final moments. The request was direct and human, the ask of a son who is still in the first hours of a grief that has not yet fully arrived and who wants to control, if nothing else, what version of his father he carries forward.