Dad says he was so much more than a memory...

'HE WAS MY HERO'

Abel Moreno left out early Sunday, Oct. 3, from his Billings, Mont., home so that he’d have plenty of time to cover the many long miles ahead.

He needed to make Moulton by Tuesday afternoon, where Abel said he’d promised the local police chief he’d lead up the evenings special National Night Out parade with a showpiece car he’s spent the last few months working on in tribute to his son, Lavaca County Sheriff’s Deputy Dakota Moreno, who was killed in an off-duty traffic accident last year, just three days before Christmas.

He was just 24.

“I’d love to wake up one day and realize that all this was just some bad dream,” Abel told us Tuesday, hanging back from the crowd seemed to form wherever he parked that car.

But some nightmares just stick with you, it seems, no matter how many times you wake.

It seems like only moments ago, his dad said, that Dakota was right here, just as healthy, happy and full of life as anyone. “And It feels like about a million years have passed, too, without him here now,” his dad said.

“He was my hero. Really. I mean that. He was a great kid, and grew up to become this incredible man, somebody you were proud just to be around. It may sound strange, I know, I looked up to HIM.”

Then, in a blink, he was gone.

***

It had been a beautiful, sunny day when Abel and his son set out for a ride in the country together that fateful December day. Abel had taken his pickup, while Dakota followed along on his motorcycle.

Suddenly, though, Abel said something didn’t feel right.

“I don’t know what it was, but something was just, off, you know?” Just as Abel made his turn back toward Victoria, he said it felt sort like all his nerves just fired off at once.

He checked his rearview—no sign of Dakota—but that was OK, Abel told himself. “He probably just got caught up in some traffic somewhere, I thought."

Still, what was the point of adding any more distance between them? So, Able pulled to the side of the road, popped on his flashers and waited for his son. “I kept expecting, just any minute now, I’d look back and there he’d come.”

That minute never came, however. In fact, several more ticked by as he waited.

“I thought maybe he’d stopped for some gas some place,” his dad said. “So, I tried calling him. It went straight to voicemail. Maybe, he had some mechanical trouble of some sort. A flat, or something maybe. So, I called again. Once more, voicemail.”

Ever antsier just sitting there, Abel said he finally decided to turn back.

They'd probably sit and laugh about this together one day, Abel said he remembered thinking.

“As soon as I rounded that corner and saw those flashing lights, I knew that’s where he’d be,” Abel said. “I just assumed he stopped to help out, you know. Wasn’t ’til I saw what was left of his motorcycle that I realized that wasn’t it.”

Accident investigators would later piece together that Dakota was hit head on by a car moving at highway speeds. The impact flung him several feet away into the roadside ditch.

The driver of other car later told officers that she never saw the man on the motorcycle. Even standing on the roadside with police after the accident, that phone of hers, along with her thumbs, never stopped.

By the time his father arrived—maybe 20 minutes, tops, Able said, since he’d last seen his son, up and riding around fine, not more than a mile from that very spot—Dakota had already breathed his last.

Seems a text message took priority over his son’s life that day, Abel told me. He slowly looked down at the black-cased cellphone that hung limp in his palm and was dead quiet for several seconds.

When he spoke again, his voice was low enough to be a whisper. “I’ve never looked at one of these the same since,” he said.

***

Abel’s hardly the only one knows the emptiness left behind by Dakota’s passing. As his dad noted before, Dakota had a way of making folks feel good, just having him around.

Not surprising, he had more than a few who called him their friend. They drove in from all over Lavaca County Tuesday to visit with Abel and check out the car they’d already heard so much about.

One of them was Cpl. Matthew Keller, of Hallettsville, a 10-year veteran with the Lavaca County Sheriff’s Office. He brought his entire family with him to Moulton’s National Night Out festivities last week, including his wife, Sonia; sons, Anton, age 6, and Ivan, age 2; and infant daughter, Reagan, who just turned 1.

Cpl. Keller and Dakota came to know each other at work and became friends in the process. But as Sonia shared with us, Dakota wasn’t just her husband’s work buddy.

“Dakota was like a big brother to my son, Anton,” she told me a few days after we’d left Moulton. “Those two got extremely close, and my boy just adored him.”

Young Anton and little brother Ivan were hard not to notice at Tuesday’s goings-on in Moulton.

The boys wore these dapper, freshly pressed khaki short-sleeved button-downs with identical narrow black neckties, the words “LAVACA COUNTY DEPUTY” neatly embroidered in perfect black caps across their backs.

They’re the sort of kiddos that we news photographer types will spend half an event, just trying to frame that one perfect angle to share with those who appreciate a good picture.

It was in that mode, pretzeling myself into yet another contortion there in the grass, that I came to notice something else, too. Suppertime was already on us when I first noticed it, and the sun hung low over the tops of the oaks that surrounded us.

I thought it little more than a plaything, at first. Then, I began noticing the extreme care and tenderness—a reverence, almost—that young Anton doted on his little toy bear.

By all outward appearances, it was just a simple stuffed animal. I had it pegged as black, at first, but in the right light, it seemed to have an almost bluish tint to it. Hard to tell, that time of day. Light can trick the eye. Still, it was not unlike those little Beanie Baby toys my own kids once played with, back when they were small, the larger versions of those toys, at least.

I noticed that every time people’s cameras got to clicking around that car—which was near constant, all evening long—and especially when young Anton got in the picture—which, likewise, was almost always because he never strayed far—the boy always made sure that his bear was posed just right for the photo. He must’ve repositioned the critter a good dozen times to make sure it was properly displayed in whatever picture got snapped.

“That little police bear my son was holding was made from a shirt that belonged to Dakota,” Anton’s mom would later tell me. “It kinda helped keep his memory alive with our family.”

Most who gathered at Moulton City Park came for the music, games, food and freebies offered up at the National Night Out event—as well as checkout the emergency vehicles of every size and shape, with displays of every nifty gizmo and gadget they carry, representing almost every first responder agency in the county—but few could walk past that custom-wrapped Camaro that Able brought down from Montana without stopping to ogle it, at least a while.

It wasn’t hard to tell why young Anton had come, or for that matter, which of those rides he liked best. Because all evening long, he rarely left its side.

“That’s a mighty nice automobile, isn’t it?” I said to him at one point.

“Uh-HUH,” he answered, head pumping up and down in a nod that seems to start someplace just above his ankles. “It’s my favorite-est.”

Indeed, I think he described what many felt that day but couldn’t find the right word for.

Also arriving in Moulton that day was George Sierra, Dakota’s closest friend. George works as corrections officer at the county jail. And he, too, came wheeling into town with a special ride last week.

George and Dakota used to ride motorcycles together, you see. They rode together nearly all the time.

So, after everything happened and Abel was left to sort through his son’s possessions, he said he came across one item that he knew right away was headed to George just as soon as he could get that way. The item? A motorcycle. Dakota’s first, actually.

Turns out, it was that very motorcycle that George came to Moulton on last week.

“Dakota wound up replacing it with a much nicer one, so this one kinda sat around for a few years,” George said. “But he always said he was going to fix it up one up one day. When Abel showed up with it, I knew right then what I had to do next.”

Much like Abel, working on that Camaro of his, George went to work, piece by piece.

Most of the plastic farings and flanges that adorn bike, George said he tracked down on the internet. He said he even managed to find these tiny red spikes someplace, because “Dakota always liked those, for some reason.”

“I wish he could see it now, all fixed up," he said. “He’s probably the only one who would really know what all work it took to make it look like it does now.

“But mostly,” George added, “I wish he could see it now because I’d love to see his face when he did.”

***

Dealing with Dakota’s loss is something ever present for Abel these days. It’s worn on his marriage, he said, even taken a mighty healthy bite out of his savings. While he never put an actual dollar figure to how much that might be, just one fact was certain.

He spared no expense. It shows, too, most anywhere Able and his car turn up.

Before coming to Moulton Tuesday, Abel stopped by the Port Lavaca Police Department to visit some old friends there. It made a big enough splash in that town that it wound up on the local television station out of Victoria later that evening. It made the regional daily newspaper the following day when he ran it by Victoria PD and county sheriff’s office. And over the weekend, social media was all abuzz when Abel and his car turned up at Turkeyfest in nearby Cuero.

It’s messaging, “Don’t Text and Drive,” seemed a natural fit. Considering the consequences he’s come to know because someone failed to heed those words, Abel said he couldn’t think of a better spot for it. Because, as he went on to say, “If this car helps remind someone of those words even once and works to save just one life down the road, it was worth every cent I put into it.”

Hitting all the big events, "it’s nice that people appreciate it, but that’s not why I did this,” he said. “More than anything, I needed a project of some sort, something to keep my mind off things. This car wound up being it.”

It was something he could put heart and soul into these last few months. And it was precisely what he needed right then, he told us.

Because despite all its fanfare, it’s those quiet times he’s spent with it, alone, that Abel said he’s appreciated most.

Like paying a visit last Wednesday, Oct. 6, to the spot where Dakota left this world. Turns out, that day would have been Dakota’s 25th birthday.

After all the bustle of the last week, the quiet did him good. “It was a good day,” he said. Abel said he planned to return home to Montana in the next week. Beyond that, only time will tell.

“Everybody grieves different, I guess,” he said. “This is how mine turned out. It’s hard, though, let me tell you. Still is. Fathers shouldn’t have to bury their sons. Still, I have to say this: Working on this and sharing it with others has made it feel just little bit better. And for that, I’m grateful.”