A family fights for the right to keep a memorial to a murdered teen.

Enrique Sosa had ambitions, and at age 14, he had started carving out a path for how he would fulfill them. After he would graduate from Everett Alvarez High School, where he was a member of the school’s Junior ROTC program, he planned on joining the Marines, and after serving in the Marines, he wanted to become a contractor and build things.

“He loved helping people. That was his thing,” his sister, Cecily Rodriguez, tells me. “Even when he was growing up, if a friend didn’t have money for ice cream, he would buy them the ice cream. He would make sure everyone was taken care of before himself. Even to the day he passed away, it was something he always did.”

That day came last winter. About 6:30pm on Jan. 17, Enrique was walking home from a friend’s house, taking a route along Russell Road that took him past Gavilan View Middle School, when a dark-colored SUV came upon him. He exchanged words with the occupant or occupants, and someone in the vehicle shot him. He died that night at Natividad Medical Center, Salinas’ first homicide of the year, but certainly not the last. No arrests have been made. Salinas police have described the killing as gang-related, based on words Sosa exchanged with the assailants and evidence found at the scene.

“We don’t know who it was or why it happened,” says Rodriguez, who now lives in Bakersfield. “He was the baby of our family, my mom’s last born, my youngest sibling. We weren’t there to protect him.”

They are, however, there to remember him. Near the location where Sosa was shot, his family has placed a memorial, the type of street-side scene with pictures and flowers and candles noticeable to passers-by and cars driving down the road. Right now, the memorial also features back-to-school memorabilia placed there by his mother, because Sosa loved going back to school every year.

Even as they fight for justice for their murdered son and brother, Sosa’s family now finds itself in another fight, this one to maintain the memorial. Shelly Morr, the superintendent of the Santa Rita Union School District, which includes Gavilan View, has asked the county to remove the memorial. The request centers around complaints from parents of Gavilan View students, who maintain it’s difficult for kids to get through the grieving process when they have to pass by the memorial every day.

According to emails obtained from the city of Salinas via a Public Records Act request, Morr had made a previous request to the city in early April to remove the memorial. And not realizing the memorial actually stood on county property, city maintenance workers visited the Sosa family, told them the memorial would be coming down, removed the items the next day and returned them to the family. After determining the memorial was actually on unincorporated county land outside of city limits, the memorial went back up.

The county’s policy on such memorials is that it doesn’t have a policy. In an email to Linda Gonzalez, chief of staff to County Supervisor Luis Alejo, the county’s Chief of Building Services and Acting RMA Deputy Director Neville Pereira stated that the county maintains a hands-off stance as long as the displays aren’t impeding the flow of traffic and don’t pose fire, health or safety concerns. That email was included in a number of emails provided to me by the city. The non-policy, in short, is to respect a family’s grieving process and let the memorial take its course.

I reached out to Morr to ask for her side of things, but she did not return several messages requesting comment. Alejo, meanwhile, whose district includes the spot where Sosa was shot, says he called Morr in May to ask why she wanted the memorial removed, but says she never called him back.

“I know how much her request hurt the family and I still don’t understand how an educator and leader of a local school district would want to do such a thing,” Alejo says. “It lacks compassion and respect for Enrique’s memory and the pain his family and friends suffer every day.

“Monterey County,” he adds, “has no plans nor does it intend to remove this roadside memorial for Enrique. We lost a young man, and the least we can do is respect this small memorial in his honor.”

MARY DUAN writes The Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com.