Laurie Valdez: Healing Invisible Wounds
Laurie Valdez is a fearless mother, single parent, advocate, protector, and truth teller born and raised in San José, CA. She is the founder of Justice for Josiah, an organization named after her son that she created in response to the murder of her partner, Antonio Guzmán López, on February 21, 2014 by SJSU police. In the process of grieving her own loss, she has become a beloved friend and first contact for families across Santa Clara County and even Salinas, who find themselves lost in the traumatic aftermath of police violence, offering support, resources, and understanding. With her generous and courageous heart, she shares about helping to heal the invisible wounds.
What was life like before February 2014 and did you consider yourself an activist before that?
I’ve never considered myself an activist, even now. People call me an activist, but I always consider myself an advocate. I’ve always been the voice for kids who were mistreated in school; I’ve always been that person to challenge a teacher– or whoever it is– if they’re going to affect a child in a negative way. Messing with me is one thing, but mess with my kids, or other kids, and I catch wind of it– you’re going to have hell to pay. People are afraid, or they don’t know how to use their rights and advocate. We have to remember there’s policies and procedures; you have to use their rules against them. I will advocate for people, and I try to teach people how to advocate for themselves, for their children, and even the homeless people.
That’s just me, and that’s just what was instilled in me by my father; I came from a big family of 18, you know, there’s a lot of us. My dad was a hard worker and he always instilled in us to have compassion: to never look down on anybody unless we were going to help them out; that we’re not better than anybody because we have a house. People on the streets are humans too, and they deserve to be looked at as that. Thank God that my dad raised me like that because some people look at homeless people like they’re less human.
Today I’m glad that whenever my kids see homeless people, they want to help them. I always keep water in my trunk, and when it’s hot days, my kids say, “Mom, there’s a homeless person, I think they need water. Can we give them water?” and I’m like, “Yeah, of course.” Sometimes they say, “Mom, can we buy food for them?” I can’t buy food for everybody, but we can make sandwiches; we’ve brought homemade sandwiches to people on the street, and we take cold water and clean wipes. My kids are very empathetic, very compassionate kids. But they’re also kids who are traumatized and always watching their backs now. It bothers me that my son’s scared whenever he sees a cop.
I don’t even live in that fear and I’m the one that’s talking out there; cops know who I am. So yes, they can mess with me, but what really bothers me is that my son lives with that fear.
I consider myself a person in the community who will just be there and advocate for whoever needs help, to be a voice for the people who are being silenced. I think the activists activate people and advocates raise awareness to let people know what’s going on and show them. I’ve always been a little bit of both but I mainly consider myself an advocate.
What was your experience creating Justice for Josiah? How do you want to see it move forward?
One week after Antonio was killed, I had an interview here. I contacted the news and they came to my house, because there was so much negativity in the comments being made about Antonio, it bothered me. I was in shock, basically. The first week, I couldn’t believe he was gone.
I never fed into the negative comments, but when I read them, they would hurt me. I wanted to go off on these people, but I felt, “Why waste my breath?” They didn’t know him– they were just talking out of the side of their neck, so they’re not worth my frustration. Still it was eating me up. I have to defend his honor for my son and my daughter because that’s not who he was; I didn’t want my son to grow up and later read all of these negative comments and believe his dad was a bad person. I want him to be able to know we always defend him, because that’s not who his dad was.
And so, I contacted the news reporter Vic Lee, who was the first one at the scene, and told them who I was. Right away they got back to me and we set up the interview here. Students from San José State, from MEChA, Colectivo Justicia, and SAHE saw me on the news and they asked Vic how to contact me. There was a young lady I called and she told me, “There’s a group of people who’d like to meet with you and see how we can help.” I remember I met them at the Martin Luther King Library, and I had Josiah with me.
When I got there I had just expected a few people, and then I walked into that room where there were 30–40 people. I looked around and they all introduced themselves. I told them who I was, and that I was very pleased and grateful that they wanted to learn how they could help me. I just said, “I want to let you know who Antonio was and what kind of person he was. Number one, he was a very quiet, very respectful, very helpful person. And he always put the kids before himself.”
With Antonio’s death, there’s no justice for him. No matter what I do, he’s not going to come back– so there’s no justice. Antonio would want me to fight so his son doesn’t have to suffer without him. He would want me to have Justice for Josiah in the sense that the truth come out and that changes are made so no other child has to grow up fatherless.
I know that’s what Antonio would want because he would give his last dollar– he would do anything, he would stay without– so that the kids would have. Antonio used to always say, “You know if anything ever happens to me, you make sure you take care of the kids. Don’t let nobody hurt them.” I know that’s what would please Antonio because there’s no justice for a dead person. There’s no justice for them. But there has to be some kind of justice for the person that’s left here living, the littlest one, the most vulnerable one– so that’s where it began.
The students and I started having meetings. I told them, “I want everybody to know from this day forward that this is my fight. If you’re going to support me, you can support me. But there will be no instigating officers by calling them ‘pigs.’ I will not allow people to talk negatively in front of me, because my kids will be with me and my kids do not need to be traumatized more.” If anybody has those feelings I preferred them not come around whenever we did anything. They all agreed and then some of them personally introduced themselves to me and said that they were sorry about Antonio’s murder.
We had a memorial service here so they asked, “What can we do to help?” I told them, “You could send an arrangement of flowers in Josiah’s name, so his dad has flowers; he is going to be sent to Mexico.” So they did: MEChA and SAHE got two beautiful flower arrangements and they showed up at the memorial service on March 3rd. One of the girls helped me do a video that I played and one of them was doing the media press conference, which they also arranged for me. One of the young guys’ brother drew the picture that says “Justice for Josiah” from a picture of my son kissing his dad’s picture at the place where they killed him. He designed that so that became our logo; it’s Justice for Josiah but then Antonio’s name is in there and it says ‘police brutality.’
We’d have meetings of what we were gonna do. They helped me make a flyer about what happened, and we started doing canvassing right after, on every Friday about an hour before the time Antonio was killed. They would stay out there walking and giving flyers to people. They were getting witnesses’ statements and helping gather information like that for me, from March until school was out.
They were just there, and a lot of them helped me with the kids; they would take them out for a while. They brought Josiah books and some people would come over here and help keep them entertained. It was just when I needed it most. There were certain people that Josiah clung to, like Victor, who’ll still come over here and play with him. The other girls that were here would come with me to events so they could watch the kids while I was speaking.
Once a lot of the students graduated, they moved on, but they still keep connected with me. When I ask them for support they’re still there, but it’s hard to keep the momentum going at San José State because there’s a turnover all the time. We have to keep on educating them and raising awareness, so it’s hard. But you know I do it. And there are people that still help me do it. I think in the five years since he was killed, people know who Antonio was and everybody’s heard of Justice for Josiah. I love when I go someplace and the youth come up to me and tell me, “I want to help. I want to help make a difference, because it hurts me about your little boy.”
I feel my biggest reward is if I can reach a few people and open their minds to help make a difference.
Our youth and children are feeling so much empathy and compassion to make a difference, and they are really the voices that are going to have to make the change happen. Because they’re the youngest, they’re the most vulnerable– and we are failing them. Adults have to protect the youth. My son lost his father.
It takes a village, and the village has really abandoned my son, has abandoned Jacob Dominguez’s three kids, has abandoned Philip Watkins’ daughter. Those children have never gotten support from the government, no help with burial for their fathers, no help for the mothers to get them the stuff they need for school, you know — we’re left with having to be a mom, grief counselor, provider, protector and then we have to fight an overwhelmingly unjust system. It’s a lifetime.
We were sentenced to this life we didn’t choose, and now we have no other option. We have to live with it and we have to learn how to bring back something positive.
You’ve worked with families across California and across the country; what makes the police brutality in San José different or similar to other cities experiencing state violence?
San José has a history of police violence that’s so deep rooted in greed and secrecy that they’re able to hide it. They can hide it better because there’s so much attention focused on high tech and the “big stuff”– that people aren’t noticing what’s going on in the community. So that’s how they are able to mask everything that’s going on. It’s a culture–the culture of police violence– but it’s also the Mexican culture that some of the families have because they don’t want to bring attention to themselves; they don’t want the media bringing up their stepson or their daughter who was in jail, because the cops will try to drag out everything to discredit the family. So a lot of the families have that sense of wanting to keep their family safe from being scrutinized. They don’t want to talk about it, which is hard, because even though they’re being mistreated, they keep their silence and so the cycle continues. The problem doesn’t fix.
I’ve always said, “I need to get out there, knock on doors and talk to them.” We’ve got to start teaching people: you have rights, you need to learn, and we need to speak up together because we can’t just allow ourselves to be killed. No one is recognizing that we’re getting killed just as much– but our community is not speaking. I’ve met Eric Garner’s mom, I met Trayvon Martin’s mom, I know Wanda. I know Mike Brown’s mom, his dad. Josiah’s met them all too. It’s hard; I can’t even imagine the pain of those mothers that lost their sons, but I know their pain is very strong because I lost my partner and my son lost his father.
As a mother, I feel the pain my son suffers. Him waking up, screaming with fear, and knowing the fact that as a mother I can’t fix it. I can’t take him to the doctor to get him medicine to make it better, and I can’t bring his dad back. It makes me feel helpless as a mother, because I can’t do anything to fix his broken heart, ever. I can’t ever make that trauma go away. This is something he has to live with and hopefully it doesn’t damage him, because trauma untreated and ignored can cause lifelong problems into adulthood– emotionally, mentally, and physically. Already my son has health issues– so it has affected his physical health. His pediatrician just recently commented she was concerned with his ongoing unresolved grief. She can’t prescribe a medication to make it better– we need our leaders to take action.
His grief, pain, and suffering should not be ignored, just like those of any other child. How are we, as a society, just going to sit and say we care about our most vulnerable, when we are subjecting and exposing our children to state-sponsored violence? By police, by the zero tolerance policies in school, by the juvenile justice system, and by the CPS who pick and choose. CPS is not doing anything to protect Josiah’s emotional and mental well-being– and that’s a form of abuse too! But because the state’s doing it, it’s OK? How is it OK for them to abuse kids in juvenile justice, to taser them? We couldn’t do it as parents because CPS would come and arrest us and take our kids away. But we’re allowing strangers who work for the government to do it to those children?
Nobody has a right to touch other people’s children– to subject them and continue to expose them to violence. What kind of future are they going to have?
Will they think that’s the way they should be? They’re exposing youth as if this is OK; you grow up, you become a cop, you could kill people– No! That’s not acceptable in my book. They’re sending the wrong message and they need to start leading by example. It’s frustrating, because every single person– authority figures or civic leaders– always get uncomfortable to talk about trauma, and they avoid it. I’ll ask, “So what about the kids’ trauma? You guys think about that?” The mayor, the council members– I’ve talked to them all. Nobody wants to address it– why? Why is children suffering trauma too political that everybody’s ignoring it? It needs to stop.
Not enough people are aware, and our schools aren’t trauma-informed either. Every year for Father’s Day I tell the teachers, “Let me know when you’re going to do a project, because I need to prepare him if he wants to do it for his Dad or not. Because if he doesn’t, I’ll just keep him home because I don’t want him to be traumatized.”
His teacher knew it and she forgot. So the day they were doing the project, she tells my son, “Josiah, since you don’t have a dad, you could go over there in the corner and make a paper airplane or read a book.” It pissed me off when I found out two days later, because he didn’t tell me the day it happened. I know the teacher didn’t think about it, because she’s not trauma-informed taught. He was affected by it, because later when I asked him, “How does that make you feel?” He goes, “Sad. All the kids were making one.” It traumatized him because he felt like he was singled out and made fun of. He could have still made a card for his dad; she should have let it be his option.
There was another incident where he was saying his chest hurt him and she was asking him, “Do you want to go to a nurse or do you want us to call your mom?” And he tells her, “No, I think it’s Jesus. He’s gonna let me die so I could see my dad.”
That’s what he said, and she emailed me that evening saying she was so shocked at what she heard that she didn’t even know how to respond. And she felt inadequate not knowing what to say. She didn’t want to hurt him because she could tell his feeling was deep, and she apologized. She said, “I didn’t know what to do, so I told him, ‘If you want to go drink some water or you want your mom to come — just let me know.’”
But she said she didn’t really know how to respond, so he just put his head down on the table. The fact that his teacher didn’t know how to respond is very crucial to him being able to have his feelings validated in school. He needs to be comforted and reassured that he’s going to be ok, to help him heal. That’s why I want Justice for Josiah to be the flicker of a flame that lights up everybody and raises awareness that these children have to be protected. We need to invest in their healing and we need to start holding adults accountable, regardless of their job titles, because it is affecting our children and our community. It’s not healthy, and it’s costing too much for us to continue to ignore it.
Why do we keep on investing in the entity that is exposing our children to trauma?
I want Justice for Josiah to eventually become a 501c3 nonprofit so it can be a place of support for other families impacted by systemic violence– to give them resources, or get them help with whatever they need, like burial costs; even to be able to send flowers on behalf of Justice for Josiah or to help the children through school. This past year, I had a Special Christmas from Heaven event for 30 kids in the Bay Area who lost a parent to police violence.
I got the 100 Black Men from Silicon Valley to sponsor these kids; the idea is they receive gifts from their Angel Dad/Mom through their sponsor. They each got really nice gifts– including a bike with a helmet and lock. It was special to these kids, all who have lost a father; they don’t get counseling– they aren’t offered help with nothing.
As Justice for Josiah, we can be a place families can come to receive advice or guidance; help with figuring out what they have to do, what attorney’s to go to; how to advocate for their kids in school; and just be that support system. We would be able to hold healing spaces for the families and also for the children, to teach them the skills to help them heal and express their emotions, and be able to share their pain. We can put pressure on the policy makers. So that’s what I hope it will be: a beacon of light for the children, where they know they’re gonna have somebody there for them and their families. And they’re not going to fall through the cracks and into the school-to-prison pipeline just because our government leaders have failed to provide any kind of resources for them. That’s my goal.
When Father’s Day comes, everybody takes their kids to the cemetery. Eventually I also want to be able to get a permanent space, either at the church where Antonio used to volunteer or where he was killed, in Antonio’s name for Josiah. His dad was buried in Nayarit, so he doesn’t have a memorial here that he can visit. Every time we put something up by the tree where Antonio was killed, the San José State police officers take it down; I know because the neighbors tell me. They take it down all the time.
So another one of my missions is to get a permanent place for Josiah to be able to remember his dad and have for him: so his dad won’t be forgotten, so there will be a reminder that a life was taken, and so people in the community can see who this person really was.
Everybody doesn’t realize. In our case, nothing has been revealed. They’ve kept it under a gag order and they dismissed our case in the appellate court. They keep on dismissing because they don’t want the truth coming out. It’s sad because all these other cases are closing and videos are getting released– but why aren’t ours? I see my community is not trying to help me get the videos released. Jeff Rosen, the County DA, has said he doesn’t release the videos, and yet they’ve been released in every other case after us.
What’s really on those tapes that they don’t want the public to see? It’s just so hard. That’s why I just have to continue until I get the truth out there. Eventually they’re going to have to give up those tapes; someone’s going to have to give in sooner or later. And so the truth has to come out.
Antonio knew he was going to eventually get killed by police; he used to tell me that. The cops had beaten him up a few months before, and I used to tell him, “You’re crazy– they can’t kill you just because you’re not from here!” He said, “They don’t want me here; they’re going to kill me.” And that’s exactly what they did, unfortunately.
I don’t know who the cops were that beat him up a few months prior, and I don’t know if the two who killed him, or the third officer that nobody’s talking about, were involved with the other incident, because I can’t get that information.
Editor note: It’s been five years of fighting an uphill battle since Antonio was murdered by SJSUPD, and finally Laurie was able to see the redacted bodycam videos from that life-altering morning. However, despite the victory of passing SB 1421, a release of records law which has been in effect since January 1, 2019, Laurie’s public records request has been denied by the San José Police Department, as of February 2019.
How are you feeling? How are you personally taking care of yourself?
I have the other families and we get together on retreats; we go to a beach house in Watsonville to spend the weekend together, cooking and laughing– just away from everything. I also went out there for four days with two mothers, from Baltimore and Anaheim, to do a participatory video of our journey, from pain to resilience. Just last weekend they were in Detroit screening our video we did over there. It was my daughter’s birthday so I couldn’t go, but they had me on a video call so all the people there were able to see me and I was able to talk to the audience too. People were really speechless after they saw it. They couldn’t even ask questions to the other two mothers who were on the panel because they were so distraught and moved, and dealing with the emotions they heard from us. People were touched by it and they were motivated to help be a voice for everybody too, so it was a success.
Little by little as we raise awareness, it’s going to get better.
What hopes and dreams do you have for Josiah?
My hopes and dreams for Josiah are for him to grow up happy, safe. To not become a statistic in the system that has failed him, for him not to end up as a school-to-prison pipeline kid. I don’t want that for him; I want him to grow up, to go to college, to do something positive. To show everybody.
All I want is for him to be OK emotionally and mentally, that he’s able to heal and the pain that he’s been suffering doesn’t affect him in a negative way into adulthood. And that he can be a powerful example, a great leader, and make a difference; he can be that voice for himself and also for his father, and make his dad proud. I know his dad’s proud because already Josiah’s spoken at two of the hearings.
I don’t want him to be living in fear; I want him to know that he’s going to be protected and his community cares, and that we’re going to fight for change. No matter who did it, we’re going to make it so he can make a difference. My kids are pretty empathetic and there’s times I see Josiah so hurt. So angry that he doesn’t have a dad. I see the anger in him, and that’s what scares me. He’s a kid and he’ll have his good days and bad days, but people don’t see the fear in his eyes when he has to go to bed. He never was afraid of the dark, and now he can’t go to sleep unless the light’s on. He’s woken up screaming, I don’t know how many times, where it took me so long to console him. I would get angry, because he shouldn’t be screaming like this. The officers are the monsters in his dreams because his dad is not here. It’s just hard. He was only 4 years old when he saw his dad in the coffin– he called it a box. At the time he asked, “Why is he in here? How come he can’t get up?”
His pediatrician says even though he might not understand what death is, at least he’ll remember, and he’ll have that image, that he did see his dad in that box. And he won’t think his dad didn’t love him or his dad abandoned him because he didn’t want to be with him. But that he’s gone because he can’t be here no more, because of what happened. I just worry about him being able to heal.
He has a lot of friends and his friends’ parents are very good when they take Josiah to visit with them. But I know it bothers Josiah to see his friends with their dads. He couldn’t ever have his friends come with him and his dad to go play ball at the park. I can’t do the father-son things that Antonio would do with him; I could try but it’s not the same.
What words of wisdom would you like to give to mothers who have also lost their partners, and are also raising fatherless/parentless children?
Don’t be afraid to let people know the pain your children are suffering, and reach out for help. Make people aware of what’s going on. Don’t be silent, and know that you’re not alone; you can always come to me. Reach out to me and we’ll connect you with everybody else. To make sure that your kids are protected– advocate for them in their schools. Let them know. Kids act out because they’re hurting, because this is what happened. You need to know and identify it.
Advocate because we need to have trauma-informed systems– in the schools, the justice system, the courts, police. Just like mental health crisis training, anybody in the system has to be trauma-informed to understand it in order to help it heal.
So that’s what I’d say: always know that you’re not alone, and do not be afraid to speak up and document everybody you talk to: every person, every witness, any officer– document what they say to you. Every time you go to court, you’ll have documentation of people who change their statements. I have documentation of what the homicide detective told me in the first few days, and then months later he told me something different.
So you gotta document, because when they’re lying and they’re caught, they try to cover it up and they can’t even keep up their own lies– and that’s the pattern we have to show.
Know that there are people that care: there’s Justice for Josiah, Silicon Valley De-Bug, the Love Not Blood Campaign, and the Idriss Stelley Foundation. Those are places you could go to get resources, help, and support. Never be afraid to reach out because they’ll be more than willing to help you out.
Watch this video about the Healing Invisible Wounds retreat that took place in 2017.
