Gregory Cumana rolls in bed, imagining his brother’s blood pooling, his body growing cold. He can’t accept that, for the third time, he has lost a brother to violence.
Elio Cumana-Rivas, Gregory’s brother, was one of the eight victims of the shooting at Allen Premium Outlets on May 6. He was 32 and had been living in Dallas for eight months, Gregory said, awaiting the processing of his asylum application. He had come fleeing violence and poverty in Venezuela.
“What saddens me the most and doesn’t let me sleep is to think how he died, how he was left alone, the time he was lying on the floor while that man was shooting. If he bled to death, if someone helped him, if he couldn’t run, if he didn’t have time for anything,” Gregory told The Dallas Morning News, from Venezuela.
He has watched videos of the shooting online, staring at the bodies on the ground, looking for his brother. “And you wonder if he was there, or where he was, because I don’t see him. There are so many things that don’t let you sleep, and you think how sad and how lonely my brother died.”
Elio was killed over 2,000 miles away from Caracas, his hometown. His family is still unclear as to what happened to Elio, how many bullets hit him, whether he died instantly or suffered, said Gregory, a music teacher in Venezuela’s National Orchestra System.
At 42, Gregory now mourns three murdered brothers. The first to die was 18 when he was tortured and killed, Gregory said. Near the place where he was murdered, people say he begged for his life because he had a newborn son. That didn’t make the killer change his mind.
The second brother also died violently. Gregory prefers not to explore the details. He doesn’t really know and talking about it doesn’t feel safe.
“We never understood what they did to him, we never managed to understand why,” Gregory said. “We leave everything in God’s hands.”
Venezuela has had one of the worst murder rates in the world in recent decades, especially for young men. According to Amnesty International, in 2017 alone at least 95% of the victims of homicides were young men aged 12 to 44. Between 2015 and June 2017 there were 8,200 extrajudicial executions.
Now, the Cumanas have lost Elio, and the family is down from six siblings to three: Gregory and Yarelis, who live in Venezuela, and Luis, in Chile.
He looked out for his family
Gregory remembers his brother Elio like this:
He was always the most playful and teasing of his siblings. He loved car racing and dreamed of seeing the Daytona International Speedway. He was the closest to his father, Santos Emilio Cumana, a retired military officer and a professor at the National Experimental Polytechnic University of the Armed Forces of Venezuela.
Their father called Elio “Papuchi” — “Little Daddy” — and the brothers teased him about it.
“Papuchi! Papuchi!” they called him.
“We teased him a lot with that,” Gregory said.
Elio was the brother who kept an eye on everyone and messaged them to see how they were doing. He went out of his way to make sure his dad had everything he needed.
Elio’s mother suffers from a degenerative mental illness that requires medication, and he made sure she got it.
“He had such optimism,” Gregory said. “Even if the day was gray, the smile never left his face.”
Gregory remembers the things his brother said to him in dark times:
“This is how things are.”
“There is no need to fall.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Everything will be all right.”
Three days before the shooting, Elio called Gregory on a video call to wish him a happy birthday. They joked, and the last thing they said was that they both had to look forward to life.
Pursuing a dream
Elio studied computer science for a few semesters at the university where his father worked in Venezuela, but he dreamed of being well off, of graduating and buying a house.
He immigrated to Panama and lived there for two years but couldn’t afford his university studies.
A friend in Dallas convinced him that he would have a better chance of getting ahead if he came to the United States, and in September 2022 he decided to take to the road.
It took him about 15 days to travel from Panama to the United States by foot, bus and train.
He kept his family apprised of his whereabouts through texts and videos. He took La Bestia, “The Beast,” or “The Train of Death,” which carries as many as half a million migrants across Mexico each year, maiming and killing untold numbers as they are jolted off the tops of the train cars onto the tracks, or as they encounter kidnappers and thieves.
“Be careful,” his family told him again and again.
On his way, Elio met a Venezuelan woman traveling with a child and, at some point in Mexico, the child became ill and had to be hospitalized. Elio waited until the child was discharged so he could accompany them to the border. By October, he was in the U.S.
Once settled in Dallas, Elio began delivering food. He was trying to raise the $3,000 a friend had lent him to pay the smuggler who helped him cross Mexico.
He was always thinking about his family, and when he saw houses decorated for Halloween or Christmas, he would send pictures to his brothers.
“See how they decorate here!” he told them on a video call. “You are going to know America through my eyes.”
He didn’t say whether the U.S. was everything he’d hoped it would be, only that he worked long hours and that when he paid his debt, he would help his family back home. Gregory struggles to imagine how, in a country so big, so secure, so strong, so many could die at the hands of one troubled man.
“I don’t understand that my brother died where he was told he was going to be better off,” Gregory said.
Nearly 48 hours after the shooting, U.S. authorities finally got through to Luis Cumana, the family’s youngest brother, who lives in Chile. He was told Elio had died in Allen and had to break the news to his dad.
After his father called to let him know, Gregory sent Elio a message over the phone, just as he always did, hoping that it was all a misunderstanding.
“I left him a message on Whatsapp,” he said. “And I’m still waiting for him to answer.”
