Jorge Villatoro, 53, was already thinking about selling his Silver Spring convenience store when two men shot him to death and then carjacked a Comcast van from a nearby 7-Eleven, his younger brother told The Examiner on Wednesday.
The store wasn’t getting business and there wasn’t much cash in the register when the two Latino suspects entered Variedades Jenny around 4 p.m. Tuesday, demanding cash, Arnulfo Villatoro said.
Villatoro’s 77-year-old father was heating food in the back room at the time of the attack but heard his son telling the men he had no money. He then saw Jorge move his arm toward the counter, which is when the shots went off.
“They probably thought he was reaching for a weapon, but we don’t have one; we’re a very clean family,” Arnulfo Villatoro said.
Since first hearing of his brother’s death, Villatoro has been gathering his family around him and stepping into the gaping void that Jorge’s death has left as the first member of the once nine-member family to die. “He was like a father to me,” Villatoro said, noting how Jorge came to the U.S. in the late 1970s from El Salvador and then paid for him to come north when Villatoro was 14.
They entered the country illegally, marching across the U.S.-Mexico border, and gained their citizenship through the 1984 Immigration Bill that granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.
After that they brought the rest of their family north. The three brothers in the family rose in the ranks of a demolition company and moved from the District of Columbia to Maryland, where they bought homes and raised families.
The store was purchased by Jorge’s daughter, Jenny, 27, about 14 months ago, mostly as a way to give his wife something to do during the day, Villatoro said. His wife would work in the mornings and Jorge would come in the afternoons, often bringing his father with him.
Villatoro said he planned to take over for Jorge in caring for Jorge’s 20-year-old, mentally disabled son as well as cover the full cost of the funeral, balking at a community tradition of accepting monetary help from friends in times of emergency.
“This is the last thing I’m doing for my brother. I’ve always felt I had to be prepared if anything bad happened, and I am.”
Police continue to search for the two suspects.
