Ruben Alvaro Gonzalez, a 43-year-old Guatemalan man from Oklahoma City, was spending the evening of September 9, 2015 doing something ordinary for a father: sitting in his SUV, waiting to pick up his son from a mechanic’s shop in northwest Oklahoma City, near Northwest 2nd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. What began as a routine errand unfolded into a sudden act of violence. As the night settled over the neighborhood, two men approached his vehicle.
In moments that witnesses later struggled to fully describe, they opened fire on Gonzalez, shooting him multiple times and seizing his SUV before speeding away into the dark.
Inside the vehicle with him was his son, who saw the chaos erupt at close range as the gunmen turned an everyday task into a crime scene. Neighbors and passersby called for help, and officers and emergency responders converged on the intersection, but the damage had already been done. Gonzalez’s SUV, taken by the fleeing assailants, was later found abandoned about a mile away, its presence offering few clues beyond confirming how quickly the attackers had vanished. The car, once a symbol of family routine, now marked the trail of a getaway that left a family shattered.
In the days that followed, the story of who Gonzalez had been as a person came into sharper focus. Friends from Iglesia de Cristo Elim, a church on Southwest 25th and Portland where he was deeply involved, spoke of a man whose faith shaped his everyday interactions. They remembered how he greeted people with hugs and blessings, how he loved taking part in baptism ceremonies, and how his warmth made visitors feel less like strangers and more like family. He had come to the United States roughly twelve years earlier, working and saving with the single-minded goal of offering his children a safer, more stable life. Just three months before his death, he had finally managed to bring three of his four children from Guatemala to join him, a reunion that friends described as the fulfillment of a long, difficult dream.
That dream was torn apart in seconds. Gonzalez left behind his wife, two sons, and two daughters, a family suddenly confronted with the reality that the man who had crossed borders and sacrificed for them was gone because of a senseless act of violence at the side of a city street. His homicide was recorded as a gun-related killing in Oklahoma City on that date, one of many incidents of firearm violence, but for those who knew him, it was not a statistic but a personal loss that rippled through their church and community. Friends turned to prayer and small acts of solidarity: donations for burial expenses, gatherings at the church, and repeated pleas for anyone with information to come forward, hoping that justice might eventually match the depth of their grief.
As investigators pieced together the events of that night, the central facts remained stark and unresolved. Witnesses had seen two people flee in Gonzalez’s vehicle, but police did not immediately release detailed descriptions of the suspects, and leads proved thin. Over time, the case was cataloged among Oklahoma City homicides, with records noting that two unidentified men approached, shot him, stole his SUV, and abandoned it nearby. Yet despite the passage of years and periodic attention from crime-tracking organizations, those responsible for the killing have not been apprehended. The investigation remains without an arrest, leaving Gonzalez’s family and community still waiting for answers to a crime that turned a father’s ordinary evening into a permanent absence at the center of their lives.
