Gilberto Ramos wanted to leave his chilly mountain village for the United States to earn money to treat his mother’s epilepsy.
His mother begged him not to go. “The better treatment would have been if he stayed,” Cipriana Juarez Diaz said in a tearful interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. When he wouldn’t relent, she draped him with a white rosary for safe passage.
A month later, his decaying body was found in the Texas desert. Now, the boy has become a symbol for the perils faced by a record flood of unaccompanied children from Central America who are crossing illegally into the U.S.
Authorities said Monday that Gilberto was 11, which would have made him one of the youngest known such children to die crossing the desert. But his parents said Tuesday that Gilberto was 15.
The parents explained that they had taken several years to register his birth because of the remoteness of their village in Guatemala’s northern mountains. When they did, they had forgotten Gilberto’s actual birth date, so they listed the same date as his younger brother.
“He was a good son,” Juarez said. “May God give me the strength to endure.” The boy was shirtless, having likely suffered heat stroke, but still wearing the rosary.
