BATON ROUGE — The family and friends of a a 15-year-old who was recently shot and killed are remembering the teen who loved soccer and hoping to get the funds to send his body to Honduras. Cristofer Reyes died on May 7 when a man in a vehicle allegedly pulled up beside the teen and his friend, accusing them of burglarizing a vehicle before opening fire, according to a police report.
The friend, who was with Cristofer Reyes just before he was shot, told police that the two were walking. That’s when a man in a vehicle pulled up to them and asked if Reyes “was the one walking around the neighborhood burglarizing cars,” according to the arrest affidavit. The friend allegedly told Reyes to run and both boys ran away from the car, splitting up when the friend couldn’t jump a fence that Reyes could.
The friend told investigators he never spoke to Reyes again after that. It was after 11 p.m. on May 7 when the friend and another person started looking for Reyes because they hadn’t heard from him. The friends found Reyes laying unresponsive behind an apartment building in the area, which is where his body was when BRPD officers arrived.
Reyes’s mother, Guadalupe Martinez, told UWK that her son had been hanging out with friends earlier in the week and they’d asked him to come hang out that fateful morning. The boys were walking from the Goodwood area to the location where Reyes ended up dead.
She described to UWK the moment she saw her son laying dead on the ground: “I saw him on the ground, face down, cold and hard, bloody. He had a beautiful face, but due to the blunt [trauma] to his face, his bottom teeth fell out and his upper teeth were inward.”
“I don’t know where my strength came from to see him like that, my legs couldn’t hold me up anymore. I picked him up, I hugged him, I turned him and saw what had happened to him. I will never be able to erase that image,” Martinez went on.
Family and friends held an event tonight, May 14, at Independence Community Park to help Reyes’s family raise money to send his body to Honduras for burial. There will be soccer games for children and food items for sale.
In addition, a funeral service will happen this Sunday at 6 p.m. at 15366 Old Hammond Highway (Baton Rouge). There, family, friends and teammates will gather to remember Reyes.
Martinez said her son loved soccer and everybody who knew him liked him.
Tyler Medina is a soccer coach with PARDS soccer club, a competitive sports organization in Denham Springs, and coached Reyes in the past year. While Medina is newer to the organization, he said that Reyes has played soccer with PARDS for several years now and was well known among his teammates.
“It’s heavily affected our whole team, because our boys are very close to him,” Medina told UWK. “It’s really shook up our boys.”
While he tended to be quiet, Reyes was also a jokester and others would listen to him when he spoke. Soccer was a large part of Cristofer’s life and an “outlet” for anything he was going through, Medina said.
“Cristofer was not a bench player. He was good at what he did; he was one of the kids that had an amazing amount of talent,” the coach described. “He was always dedicated and just wanting to be out there with his friends, that was the biggest thing.”
Reyes’s team has had a great season, Medina said, and the boys won a semifinalist game just days after learning about his death.
“When the news and the word came out that apparently Cristofer passed away, we did a remembrance thing for our game in the semifinals that just happened in Broussard, Louisiana, this Sunday that just passed. So every single one of the boys wrote for Cris #3, we had the tape on our arms that we took the pictures for him and everything. It was a nice little remembrance. And then in his dedication and honor, we won. We won in the last final seconds, and it was an amazing moment for the boys and the team. There was tears shed, and it was a big thing, big thing for them.”
The team will play in a finals game on Sunday. Before the game, the coach is hoping to get the team to make a tribute video honoring Reyes as well. After the game, the teammates and coaching staff plan to help host and attend a memorial service for Reyes that takes place at 6 p.m. Sunday.
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