For the last 35 years, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s day began the same way: He woke up at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his work van and drove off to pick up his construction crew for work in Houston, his family said.

But on Tuesday, Salgado Araujo’s day would not end as it always did. He would not come home to eat a hearty dinner prepared by his wife, then spend the rest of the evening on the porch listening to music in the house he had built for his family.

Around 7 a.m., as the 52-year-old father of three picked up the last of his crew in Houston’s East End area before heading north to finish construction on several houses, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in an unmarked car fatally shot the Mexican man inside his van, Salgado Araujo’s oldest son recounted Wednesday.

ICE said Salgado Araujo attempted to evade arrest as agents tried to conduct a traffic stop as part of a “targeted operation.” He rammed into a law enforcement vehicle and refused to follow several verbal commands before an ICE agent fired his weapon in self-defense, the agency told CNN in a statement Tuesday.

Salgado Araujo had been living in the US without legal authorization, ICE said, without specifying whether the agents had been looking for him. CNN has asked the agency for more information.

But Salgado Araujo’s family disputes the agency’s account, saying they believe the man who’d been seeking a work permit would have stopped and complied with federal agents if he had known the car following him belonged to ICE or other law enforcement. Salgado Araujo did not appear to have a criminal record, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General is leading an investigation into the shooting, according to ICE. And the FBI’s Houston field office is investigating the alleged assault on a federal law enforcement officer.

Now, Texas Democratic lawmakers, activists and Salgado Araujo’s family want a fuller investigation into his death.

The case is the latest in which someone was severely injured or killed this year after being shot by a federal immigration enforcement agent. It also again raises questions about who is targeted by a nationwide immigration enforcement push the Trump administration says aims to remove dangerous criminals from the US.

‘Help me! They shot me!’

Salgado Araujo over the last year and a half had submitted pictures and statements from employers and loved ones for a work permit application, his son recalled, saying he was “close to obtaining his legal status.”

“We dotted every ‘i’, crossed every ‘t,’ filled every document, attended every appointment,” Ronaldo Salgado said.

The father had no criminal history, Ronaldo Salgado said, and was a private, hardworking family man who spent three decades supporting his wife and three sons by building hundreds of homes in Houston suburbs.

He “never wanted his name to be known by anyone outside of his family,” Ronaldo Salgado said at a news conference Wednesday. “He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people.”

On Tuesday morning, Ronaldo Salgado’s mom told him “something bad” happened to his father, the son said. They didn’t know what it was – except that it involved ICE.

Salgado Araujo had talked with his lawyers about what to do if he was taken by ICE, his son later said: He would decline to sign anything and call his son or his wife to get him released.

So, after hearing from his mother, Ronaldo Salgado immediately drove an hour to his father’s work site to find his van.

“Had he had been detained by ICE, he would have wanted the van to be delivered to the work site so that the other workers that were there could finish up the houses and the families could get paid,” the son said.

After his search came up empty, Ronaldo Salgado came across a Facebook post about ICE activity in the East End area. Around 8:30 a.m., he drove there to find his father’s van on a blocked-off street but still no sign of him.

“I frantically called family, friends, loved ones to see if they can find any information,” Ronaldo Salgado said.

Then, a video posted on social media stopped him in his tracks.

“I recognized him immediately, not from his appearance but from his voice crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out,” Ronaldo Salgado said through tears as his voice broke.

A wounded man lies face down and moans in pain as a federal agent is on the phone nearby, video taken after the shooting shows. The right side of his stomach was bleeding, said Juliet Martinez, a Houston resident who recorded the video and shared it with CNN.

“He was screaming for help and screaming that he was in pain. He yelled, ‘Help me! They shot me!’”

After hours at the scene, Ronaldo Salgado found out which hospital his father had been taken to.

“With all the hope in the world, I drove to Ben Taub Hospital, the hospital that I was born in, my brother Lorenzo Jr. was born in, and my youngest was born in,” the son said.

At the hospital, no one could give Ronaldo Salgado answers about his father’s condition, he said. He later learned of his father’s death from reports on social media, which local organizations and elected officials confirmed.

He called his mom to relay the news: The man they had called “El mundo entero,” or “the whole world,” had been killed.

Three other men in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s brother, were detained, according to his family.

A hardworking family man

Ronaldo Salgado wants the world to remember his father not for how he died but for his life as a family man who believed in the American dream.

“He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican man shot and killed by ICE,’” he said. “He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, a father, and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream.”

 

Salgado Araujo and his wife met when they were teenagers in Mexico, according to their son. He raised his three sons “on the idea of education taking us so far in life,” Ronaldo Salgado said. The eldest son became a teacher, while his brothers went into engineering.

Salgado Araujo ran his own construction business and “was known for his work ethic, his fairness, and his willingness to help anyone who needed it,” a GoFundMe page says. When people knocked on his door asking Salgado Araujo for opportunities, he would hire them to work with him, his son recounted.

Ronaldo Salgado said his father “only wanted to get back to work and back to us.”

“I am deeply heartbroken to see that the man who taught me the value of hard work, family values and education will no longer spend an evening on that porch,” he said.