Choosing to love like Chris

“He would pull people in no matter where we were, no matter what we were doing. Because he just genuinely loved people.””

Janel Carnero, speaking about her son, Chris

Chris Carnero didn’t think a Thanksgiving basket was complete just because it had everything needed for Thanksgiving dinner.

Kids liked mac and cheese. They should have mac and cheese, and Dr Pepper. Chris loved Dr. Pepper, so it seemed entirely possible that the kids receiving those baskets did, too.

“What if they wanted Dr. Pepper and now, we don’t give them a Dr Pepper?” his mother, Janel Carnero, remembers him asking. That was Chris.

He carried a second backpack to school filled with snacks to hand out. At community events, if he saw a child standing alone or looking uncomfortable, he would sit beside them with a hot dog or something else to eat and strike up a conversation.

“He would pull people in no matter where we were, no matter what we were doing,” Janel said. “Because he just genuinely loved people.”

Chris was 13 when he died after being shot earlier this year. The boy who shot him was someone Chris knew from football and school. He had reached out to Chris because he didn’t have anywhere to stay. Chris did what came naturally: He asked his parents if the boy could stay with them.

Helping kids was nothing new for the Carneros. Some stayed for a night or a week, and one lived with the family for nearly a year. They welcomed the boy into their home, where he lived for about 3½ months. Janel said the family tried to help him and reached out to authorities as they became concerned about his situation.

Then, in the Carnero home, he shot Chris. The boy was sentenced to two years in juvenile detention, the maximum sentence allowed after pleading no contest to involuntary manslaughter and illegally carrying a firearm.

There is anger in Janel when she talks about what happened. There is pain that repeatedly stops her words. She and her family are pushing for changes to a juvenile justice system she believes will return the boy who killed her son to society far too soon.

She does not pretend forgiveness has come easily, or that it has come at all.

“I don’t know that I can say I can forgive,” she said.

But anger will not be the thing that defines her or the Carnero family in the aftermath of this tragedy.

“It’s easy to be angry,” Janel said. “It’s easy to hate. But he loved. He loved everyone.”

So, Janel and her husband, Manny, along with Chris’ older siblings, Damian and Daisha, are trying to do the same. They call it, “Love Like Chris.”

In a way, it began before Chris died. The Carneros had talked as a family about organ donation, including what each of the children would someday choose when they got their driver’s licenses. So, when the family was faced with that decision for Chris, Janel said it was unimaginably difficult and, at the same time, very clear.

“He would have wanted it without question,” she said.

Organ donation became the first way Chris could keep giving. Janel is determined it would not be the last.

“I knew he had to do more good,” she said. “And he was going to do more good. And he would have wanted to do more good. So, I just needed to figure out every way I could to allow him to do that.”

The family didn’t have to look far for ideas. Chris had left them plenty. A few years earlier, for one of his birthdays, Chris had asked friends to donate items for children at a hospital. After his death, the Carneros collected stuffed animals again.

Nearly 7,000 came in, enough to distribute to children at both children’s hospitals in El Paso. Then came about 1,000 backpacks.

The family established a scholarship at New Mexico State University for students studying social work, intentionally avoiding attaching strict academic requirements to applicants. Chris had struggled to learn to read himself. Once he did, he began reading to younger children during school lunch.

“He thought it was so great,” Janel said. “Like, let’s just share it.”

That also comes through with his love of airplanes. Chris wanted to fly. He had already taken several flights through an Experimental Aircraft Association program and spent hours in flight simulators. He couldn’t earn his pilot’s license until he was 16, but he had already decided what he would do when he could fly on his own.

“He used to say that he wanted to have his own airplanes so that way he can go and fly, go have lunch in random spots around the world,” Janel said.

Now an aviation scholarship in Chris’ name will give other children ages 13 to 16 a chance to discover flying for themselves. The dream fit a kid who wanted to see the world.

Travel was a big part of the Carnero family’s life, and Chris embraced all of it. He preferred traveling at night because he loved falling asleep in one place and waking up somewhere completely new.

He made friends wherever that new place happened to be.

In Alaska, Janel remembers having to pull him away from a couple of fishermen he had somehow befriended while waiting to get on a boat. When he returned, they were waiting to find out how he had done.

“Hey, Chris, what’d you get?” they asked.

He wanted adventure. He wanted to explore. But eventually, even in the middle of someplace like Disney, Chris would be ready for the thing he really wanted to do. Swim. Ocean, lake or pool, it didn’t really matter, he wanted to be near the water.

Last Christmas, the family was at Disneyland in California. The ocean was cold, but Chris wore shorts under his sweats just in case he could work up the courage to get in. He never quite did, but Janel said he spent hours at the beach anyway, playing in the water and having the time of his life.

That love of travel has become another way for the family to carry Chris with them. Janel works in the travel industry, and many of the people she works with around the world knew Chris and knew how important giving back was to the Carnero family.

After his death, a company gathering already planned for Rio de Janeiro changed. In about two weeks, organizers put together a beach day for more than 70 children from local neighborhoods. They played soccer, met soccer players, ate snacks, made bracelets, airplanes and cars, colored and spent the day being kids. The family also donated money to help meet other needs. It was the kind of day Chris would have loved.

Now the family is looking at projects in Paris and other places that mattered to him.

“He really wanted to go and do good,” Janel said. “I’m hoping in the ways that would matter to him, to give everybody that chance.”

Back home, that same idea is taking shape without many boundaries. The family has created a Love Like Chris Legacy Fund through the Community Foundation of Southern New Mexico, designed to respond to whatever needs arise. That breadth is intentional.

“Chris was so much,” Janel said. “He didn’t just love one thing. He loved everything. So how do we do everything?”

For now, they try. When a request came from a football team that needed helmets for kids, they approved it.

“Even if it just helps a kid, give him a backpack, make them smile for a day, it doesn’t matter,” Janel said. “We just need to do it.”

The family is working to formalize a nonprofit, but Janel wasn’t interested in waiting for paperwork before beginning.

“We just jumped right in.”

Chris’ school has started a Love Like Chris Character Award, with teachers nominating students who demonstrate his kindness and character. His friends have joined the family at service projects, including the backpack drive. An upcoming air show will include a memorial flyover for the kid who wanted to become a pilot.

And Halloween is coming. Chris loved Halloween. He started planning his costume months ahead of time, then changed his mind again and again before the day arrived.

At the Carnero house, handing out individual pieces of candy wasn’t going to meet Chris’ standards. Each child needed a bag filled with candy. Halloween will become another opportunity to give.

All of it fits the boy Janel describes. Chris came to the Carneros when he was 4 months old and was later adopted. Janel remembers a baby who initially was so quiet he barely cried or made noise. The family surrounded him with affection until, she said, he became “this ball of love and happiness.”

It never really stopped.

His favorite color depended on when someone asked.

“He used to say that the rainbow was too pretty not to like all of the colors in it,” Janel said.

He loved baseball. He tried football, although it presented a problem because he didn’t particularly want to tackle anyone or be tackled himself. Janel reminded him that eventually one or the other was going to happen, but Chris had an answer.

“No, Mom, I’m just too fast.”

He was close to his older brother and sister. Janel described Damian as quiet and reserved, nearly the opposite of Chris, but said Chris pulled him out of his shell and the brothers became inseparable. Chris loved riding around town with Damian in the old Chevy truck Damian was restoring.

Mostly, though, Chris seemed to have a way of deciding there was room for one more person.

At his funeral, a girl approached the Carneros with her parents and told them she had transferred schools after being badly bullied. When Chris met her in PE, he made his position clear to his friends: Either they were going to be friends with her, too, or he wasn’t going to be friends with them.

“He just didn’t want people to be sad,” Janel said.

That instinct followed him home. The Carnero house became a place where kids gathered. The pantry became a snack station. Chris would load some of those snacks into that second backpack and take them to school to give away.

The house is still a gathering place. Sometimes 10, 15 or 20 of Chris’ friends still come over. They go into his room. They get snacks. They laugh.

It is beautiful, Janel said. And it is excruciating.

On the days when it is hardest not to be angry, the Carneros hold onto each other. Janel watches the thousands of pictures and videos Chris insisted she take — while they traveled, while he jumped on the trampoline, while he did any of the wonderfully random things that made him Chris.

“Thankfully, every single thing, he wanted a picture,” she said.

Recently, a group of his friends were at the house again. Janel could hear them in his room, talking and laughing. For just a moment, everything sounded the way it used to. Her mind instinctively went to the next thing that always happened when Chris filled the house with friends.

“Chris is gonna ask me for pizza,” she thought.

Then it hit her again. He wasn’t going to come walking into the room. But his friends were there. The laughter was there. The snacks were there.

And in backpacks and teddy bears, scholarships and airplanes, football helmets and children who might decide to sit beside the kid who is alone, the Carneros are determined that something else will remain.

“He’s still showing love,” Janel said. “So that’s all we’ve got to do now. We just have to continue that.”