CAN ANYONE MAKE SENSE OF ENRIQUE'S DEATH?

By Juan Montoya
Just a week ago, a friend of the late Brownsville Independent School District president Enrique Escobedo met him one evening at a local political function.
Escobedo, 44, was excited.
"He said he had taken up learning how to play the piano and he had a recital to do that evening," the man, a BISD employee, said. "He was like a little boy looking forward to his first recital."
And just last week, Escobedo had made arrangements with another friend to go meet a relative in Harlingen as he prepared to make a countywide campaign for district clerk.
He had filed for the office and was getting his ducks lined up in a row to make the push.
A downtown businessman who was supporting him said he was going to let him use office space in his building as an in-kind contribution to help him in his race.
"I was waiting for him to come for the keys to the office," he said. "He hadn't come to pick them up when we heard about what happened."
Others who knew him and had been with him in his last days remember a person about as far removed from suspicion to commit a self-inflicted death as there could have been.
"I saw him after his brother's posada for his security firm employees at Cobbleheads," said another. "After the crowd had cleared he was there and I saw him dance with a woman who was there with him. He didn't seem at all depressed."
Why a successful, relatively young person who had climbed the educational ladder – he had a master's in chemistry for a Texas university and received medical instruction from a Mexican medical school – and as president of the board oversaw a $500 million budget at the school district, and
was a successful businessman, would take his life is puzzling many who knew him.
"Whether you got along with him or not, it's such a loss to our community to have an educated person who cared enough to get involved in representing the public in our school district, that you have to feel the enormity of the tragedy," said a BISD administrator. "I didn't see eye to eye with him on some issues, but that didn't make him less of a human being. "It's got to be devastating to his family. I can't even think what they're going through."
There is an ongoing investigation into Enrique's death and the results of his autopsy are not complete. Regardless of what is discovered, nothing is going to bring him back and we are much the poorer for his demise.