SAN ANTONIO – A new school year has begun in the San Antonio Independent School District with some old questions still lingering from the last school year.
People familiar with the murder of Simon Cuevas III want to know who shot and killed the 14-year-old in April.
Cuevas was gunned down as he was heading home from the district’s Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP). At the time, the alternative program was housed at Brewer Academy on Merida Street.
Although San Antonio police say the investigation is still active, they have not taken anyone into custody so far. In an email Wednesday morning, police said several recent tips to Crime Stoppers have helped them identify possible suspects.
They also said, contrary to earlier statements, that the people suspected of killing Cuevas are adults, not SAISD students.
To her surprise, Ashley Litt found out Wednesday that DAEP classes had moved to the Estrada Achievement Center, about a mile away on South Zarzamora Street.
Litt had an appointment scheduled for reenrolling her son in DAEP. When she learned about the move, she had to scramble to get to the new location.
“This is where it was last school year,” she said. “I didn’t know (about the change). I had no clue.”
She said the Brewer campus holds unpleasant memories as a result of Cuevas’ killing.
“It’s still on my mind. I’m scared for my kids each and every day,” she said.
A statement from SAISD indicates the move was not related to the Cuevas murder. It said the Estrada campus was the original location of DAEP.
However, due to repairs being made on the HVAC system in that building last year, the program temporarily moved to the Brewer location.
With that work now finished, Estrada was ready to receive students again, the statement said.
Meanwhile, just a few blocks from Brewer, items left at a memorial set up by friends of Cuevas have begun to fade. Sun-bleached artificial flowers and stuffed animals lay in a pile at the street corner where he was killed.
Some wonder if that, combined with the shuttered school, signal faded interest in the effort to catch Cuevas’ killers.
One woman who lives nearby and identified herself only as Priscilla said talk about the crime seems to have died down in the neighborhood.
“It’s just quiet,” she said. “It’s like as if nothing (ever) happened.”
Priscilla said based on all the police activity at the time of the murder, she was sure investigators would have tracked down his killer by now.
“It’s a shock that nobody hasn’t been arrested, that they haven’t caught anybody,” she said.
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