A collage of photos of El Monte educator Bobby Salcedo stands outside a church Friday where services were held for the high school vice principal who was brutally slain in Mexico Dec. 30. Salcedo was remembered as an ‘ardent supporter of young people.' (Photo by Paul Vercammen/CNN)
Story Created:
Jan 14, 2010 at 12:18 PM PST
Story Updated:
Jan 14, 2010 at 12:18 PM PST
EL MONTE — A popular educator killed execution-style while vacationing in Mexico with his wife was remembered Friday as an ardent supporter of young people.
Agustin Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo, who was the assistant principal of instruction at El Monte High School and a school district trustee, was killed Dec. 30 in Gomez Palacio, the hometown of his wife, Betzy, in the Mexican state of Durango.
Authorities believe the 33-year-old educator was an innocent victim of Mexico’s drug war, and that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
An overflow crowd of more than 1,000 mourners, many of them young people who Salcedo had influenced, attended Salcedo’s funeral Mass at Nativity Church, where he had been an active member of the congregation.
Cardinal Roger Mahony, head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, addressed the audience in English and Spanish, telling them that Salcedo “brought young people to their best performance, to their full potential. ... His goodness is what sustains all of us today.”
Salcedo’s killers were “agents of … Satan,” Mahony said.
El Monte Mayor Andre Quintero, who was among the mourners, said Salcedo’s “priority was getting the students in our community into four-year universities, and he did that in every sense.”
“I mean, whether it was elementary school education, where he was a board member or as an administrator at the high school, he spent time with these young people,” the mayor said prior to the service.
“He worked with them on their applications and everything, just to make sure they could get ahead. He was completely and totally devoted to that idea that education was a gateway to opportunity,” Quintero said.
Former student Andy Fernandez called Salcedo an “amazing person.”
“Because of him, I am what I am now,” Fernandez told reporters.
Salcedo’s three brothers served as pall bearers, and in a display usually reserved for law enforcement personnel or public officials, the Los Angeles County Fire Department unfurled a large flag outside the church.
Salcedo and his wife were having dinner with some of her ex-classmates in a restaurant when armed men burst in and kidnapped him and six other men, then shot them execution-style.
Salcedo and his wife, a physician in Mexico who has been preparing to work as a doctor in the United States, had been married for two years.
In November, Salcedo was re-elected to a new term on the El Monte City School District board which governs the city’s elementary schools, and he was working on a doctorate at UCLA.
Before becoming a school administrator, he taught world history, government and economics.
Raging drug violence and rampant corruption have plagued Durango. The local Catholic archbishop, Hector Gonzalez Martinez, recently was quoted as describing the region as one where gunmen “own the night,” even threatening priests.
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