Drug cartel violence claimed this LDS teen. How his congregation rallied in response.

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Sonoyta, Mexico • Two days after Christmas, Beatrice Elena Fontes Garcia said goodbye to her son, Germán, on her way to work.

She never saw him again.

Residents of the beleaguered Mexican border town of Sonoyta, where Fontes lives, refer to the days that followed simply as “the war.”

For about a week, most of the city’s 13,000 inhabitants sheltered in their homes as dueling drug cartels battled it out over contested territory outside their front doors. On the worst day of fighting, Dec. 29, locals say the streets literally ran with blood.

That also was the day Fontes lost contact with her 19–year-old son.

The single mother of three knew her only son and eldest child “did not hang out with good people.” Where he went as the fighting got underway and why, however, she can’t say for certain. He wouldn’t tell her, instead only texting her to let her know he was fine.

“But suddenly,” Fontes said in Spanish through an interpreter, “he stopped answering my messages.”

She texted him again. And again. And again. Nothing.

Two days later, she filed a missing person report. A week after that, she was at the police station identifying his body. Officers exposed only half his face, sparing her the grisly details of her son’s death.

Still, Fontes considers herself one of Sonoyta’s luckier mothers — and not just because she at least had a body to bury.

A convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the mourning mother has lashed herself to her faith’s teachings of eternal families and her community of fellow believers like a sailor to the mast amid a hurricane.

“Without my faith, I could not bear to comfort other mothers with the same pain,” Fontes said. “I’m thankful to my Heavenly Father for accompanying me through the unimaginable.”

‘He told me he had no other choice’

Sitting tall, hands clasped and still in her lap, Fontes recounted in a voice barely above a whisper the moment she learned she was going to be a mother.

Fast forward nearly two decades, Germán was a tall, outgoing man with a strong jaw and his mother’s narrow, heavily lashed eyes. Like his sisters, he had grown up in the church, although he had since lapsed in his attendance.

Fontes, meanwhile, was a divorced mother rearing him and two teen daughters on her own when she learned from talk around town that her son had gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd.

When she confronted Germán about it, he broke down weeping.

“He told me he had no other choice,” she explained. Germán had “worn himself out” looking for work.

He was hardly alone.

Brittany Romanello, an anthropologist who has studied and written about immigration in the Southwest, said immigration policies (and the lack thereof), exploitative tourism and the constant churn of U.S. businesses looking for “cheaper” labor all combine to make a steady, good-paying job about as common as a summer frost in Mexican border towns.

Well aware of this, Fontes explained she found herself at a loss as to what to say to her son.

“I didn’t know how to answer him,” Fontes said. “And he wouldn’t tell me more.”

The last morning she saw him, he was asleep in their one-story, gray concrete home. She stopped on her way out, stirring him awake to let him know she was leaving for a shift at the retail store where she worked. And, as teens do, he told her to let him go back to sleep.

By the time she returned, he was gone.

A mother’s miracle

The Latter-day Saint branch, or congregation, in Sonoyta is modest in size. On its best days, the shoebox of a building, surrounded by a dirt parking lot, attracts 30 or 40 worshippers. But what it lacks in numbers it makes up for in dedication — to the faith and one another.

After Germán disappeared, members took turns visiting Fontes, even when it was risky to leave their homes, and helped spread the word on social media that he was missing.

“I went crazy for days looking for my son,” Fontes explained, “but I entrusted myself to Heavenly Father.”

All the while, she braced herself for the kind of bad news life in Sonoyta had conditioned her to expect.

Her prayers at the time, she recalled, went something like this: “Lord, there are so many missing people in Mexico that cannot be counted. But I pray to you, if my son is already dead, help me find him.”

The next day, the police called. Germán’s body had turned up. To Fontes’ mind, the discovery was nothing short of a miracle.

“Many mothers never find their children,” she said, noting as an example another woman in her branch, Evangelina Miranda Torres, whose son disappeared years ago without a trace. “She was very sad when she told me, ‘You were blessed to find him. I never saw [my son] again.’”

With the worst confirmed, the branch again rallied to Fontes’ side. Members pooled their limited resources (work isn’t just scarce for 19-year-olds in Sonoyta) and gave the young man a proper funeral — a lamentable luxury she wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford.

When the time came for his funeral, she was stunned at the number of people who attended, many of whom she had never seen or met before. For the grieving mother, it was further evidence that her son had cared about others and that they had cared about him in return.

“I know he was a noble person,” she said. “He would never hurt anyone because he had the principles he learned from the church. He grew up with them.”

Mexican culture puts great significance on the appearance of loved ones’ burial sites, which serve as colorful and highly personalized tributes to the deceased. But Fontes couldn’t afford even a modest marker. So a fellow branch member donated the materials for one.

And it was the branch president, or lay leader of the congregation, who accompanied Fontes to pick up her son’s death certificate an hour away.

At every step of the way, she said, “they were with me.”

Tethered to hope

Fontes’ co-worker also lost a child to December’s bloodshed. In speaking with her, Fontes realized she did not feel the same anger toward God that her friend did.

“I told her, ‘We each have our time on Earth,” she said, adding that she did not blame God.

Instead, she blamed herself — at least in the beginning. If she had been a better mother, she reasoned, maybe Germán would have chosen a different path, one that didn’t end with him staring down the wrong end of a gun.

Her guilt eased after recalling a teaching penned by her faith’s founder, Joseph Smith, stating that people are responsible for their own sins — and no other.

Even so, believing that God loves and has a plan for her son hasn’t erased her pain. It has, though, given her a hand to squeeze when sorrow surges in her, gripping her like birthing pains.

“I know,” she said, “that the gospel of Jesus Christ has made me strong.”

A blank headstone

Germán’s gravesite sits on a shadeless, sunburned hillside just outside town, one of many new agonizing additions to Sonoyta’s cemetery.

Bending over to clear away debris from the blank gray concrete headstone, Fontes said she considers moving somewhere else, to another nation, another life — maybe Tucson, Arizona, where her sister lives. She worries about her two remaining children, especially the 15-year-old, who has refused to leave the house since her brother died. Equally worrisome, however, is the thought of uprooting her family and abandoning a stable job.

Even if she were guaranteed work somewhere she thought her children would live better, she can’t go. Not yet.

Germán’s memorial isn’t finished. Fontes hopes to cover it in colorful tile one day, she said, pointing to a nearby example, and is saving up money to engrave her son’s name on the headstone.

Still, she is grateful.

“I am very blessed,” Fontes said, “to have his grave to cry on.”