The ashes of Allen shooting victim and Venezuela native Elio Cumana are finally with his family thanks to the help of other survivors of mass shootings in the United States.
Victims First, a national organization of volunteers touched by gun violence, supported the family by paying all costs to repatriate Elio Cumana’s remains from Dallas to Colombia, where his father, Santos Cumana, collected the urn on Aug. 4.
Elio Cumana, 32, was killed in the Allen Premium Outlets shooting on May 6, but his family had yet to send his remains home for burial due to high costs and diplomatic difficulties.
“This has been a very painful process, but we are getting closer and closer to home,” Santos Cumana told The Dallas Morning News.
The ashes spent months in Dallas before finally traveling to Mexico City and then to Bogotá. The absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Venezuela complicated the transfer of the remains, so Santos Cumana had to travel to Bogota and personally take them to his home in Los Teques, 18 miles south of Caracas.
Santos Cumana’s trip took almost 24 hours to complete, as he had to take a plane from Caracas to Cúcuta, a city on the Colombian border, and then fly to Bogotá, where the urn with his son’s ashes was already waiting for him.
Upon his return to Los Teques, Santos and the Cumana family will travel to Higuerote, a town 73 miles east of Caracas, where Elio will be buried in the same grave of his maternal grandmother.
“We will have a ceremony there where we stay with him all night, and then the next day, we’ll take him to the cemetery so he finally can rest in peace,” Santos Cumana said.
The last obstacle Santos Cumana had to overcome was that the keys to the box containing his son’s remains were not included in the shipment of the urn, so he had to take it to a locksmith to open it and verify that it contained the ashes.
But finally, more than 90 days after his murder, Elio Cumana is now in his father’s arms.
Victims helping other victims
Victims First founder and president Anita Busch has been in Dallas with volunteers Paola Bautista and Melissa Holmes to make it possible for Elio Cumana’s remains to be received by his relatives in Venezuela.
Busch’s family has suffered through two mass shootings. Her cousin was killed at the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., 11 years ago, when a shooter killed 12 people during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises. The second one was in Las Vegas in 2017, survived by her brother-in-law’s niece.
After the Aurora event, Busch was disappointed by how aid was distributed to victims and their families, so she began developing a new model of aid distribution that would reach people directly.
“[For the Aurora shooting] there was a nonprofit that had been collecting funds using the names and faces of our murdered loved ones, and they took the first $100,000 and then gave it to 10 area nonprofits,” Busch said in an interview with The News. “And we had people with no insurance, we had victims trying to bury their family members, people live paycheck to paycheck, and there was literally no resources available to them.”
Busch called on other survivors and family members of those affected by different acts of violence to create Victims First, an organization dedicated to supporting victims in two ways. First, it assists with immediate needs, such as funds for rent, mortgage, food or medicine. The organization also sets up location-specific funds after a mass shooting, and 100% of the funds collected go to the victims and families.
“We believe that after mass shootings, people are actually donating to help the victims. So we believe that the donor’s intent should be fulfilled,” Busch said.
In the case of the Allen mass shooting, Victims First has given more than $81,000 to people affected, and it will distribute more than $380,000 that donors gave through GoFundMe to the injured and families of the deceased. One of their most important donors was Credit Union of Texas.
Busch explained that applications are now available for the legal heir of the deceased and those wounded for the location-specific Allen mass shooting Victims Fund. People can apply at: www.victimsfirst.org/allen
After the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Victims First distributed more than $7.5 million among the victims and families.
Busch has helped communities and survivors of 47 shootings nationwide over 11 years.
United by the wounds
Bautista, 45, has helped hundreds of victims as well, including a lot of Spanish speakers. She was a victim of the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 and remembers everything she experienced like it was yesterday.
Bautista had gone with her sister to the concert and unintentionally got separated when people started running. A woman pushed Bautista and fell over her.
“When she pushed me, she got the bullets that were meant for me,” Bautista told The News.
In that moment, Bautista was shot in her right elbow, which shattered it. A man and his girlfriend, who were also fleeing, told her she had to run or she would die when the stampede of people crushed her.
She finally met up with her sister and managed to run to the airport and hide in a shipping container, where they stayed for several hours until the police rescued them.
“I never want anyone to experience what I lived through; that’s why I started volunteering,” Bautista said.
She and others from Victims First worked closely with the victims of the Uvalde shooting in 2022.
“The meaning of life changes for you. After you go through this, you open your eyes to a different perspective, a different role,” Bautista said. “And a lot of people will tell you to get over it. You can’t. That’s impossible. I mean, you can’t get over it.”
Melissa Holmes, 41, was also a survivor of the Las Vegas shooting. She hurt her knee trying to run away, and also has emotional wounds.
“For me, I look at October 1, 2017, before and after. My life before was totally different than my life now,” Holmes said.
“Your perspective on every single thing changes. Your tastes and in entertainment even, it’s never like before,” Busch said.
