Valley loses another soldier

MISSION — Juan Roman drove to the now empty lot where his best friend Diego Montoya used to live.

He picked up scraps of metal, wood and a couple of screws — tiny treasures that will forever remind him of his fallen hero.

Montoya, a U.S. Army specialist, was killed in Afghanistan earlier this week.

The 20-year-old was born in McAllen and raised in Mission until his family moved to San
Antonio about four years ago.

“He was a great kid. He was very dedicated to the Army and he wanted to be a soldier since as long as I can remember,” said his stepfather, Steve Guerra.

Montoya was deployed for his first tour in May and was stationed in northern Afghanistan, where he served as a military policeman with the 64th M.P. Company.

Details about his death have not been released by the U.S. Department of Defense, and the family will probably not know the exact cause for another six to eight weeks, Guerra said.

Montoya was a freshman at Veterans Memorial High School in Mission during the 2004-2005 school year, and graduated in 2008 from William Howard Taft High School in San Antonio,
where he took part in the ROTC program for two years.

“He loved everything about the Army,” Roman said. “He never told me he wanted to be in it. He just surprised me one day.”

Roman, who knew Montoya since kindergarten, said he worried when he found out his best friend had enlisted.

“He comforted me by saying, ‘I’m OK with this,’ and he seemed so positive about it,” Roman
remembered. “He knew what he wanted.”

Roman said Montoya wanted to own his own ranch someday and that they loved to spend their time building things in a workshop behind the soldier’s home in Mission. The property was sold after the family moved away and the mobile home where he lived was removed, Roman said.

All that remains now is an empty lot full of memories.

“There’s nothing there, but I can still picture the mobile home. I can picture the trampoline up front. I can picture the mailbox. I can picture everything,” he said. “It’s like a projector in my heart. It’s still there.”

Roman went by the lot Thursday night after learning about his friend’s death.

“I walked through the lot with my flashlight on, and I found a bunch of things that reminded me of him, little things like screws and pieces of wood,” he said. “Those things are now treasures to me.”

“We were like brothers,” he said. “We never fought. We never argued about a girl or about another person. We knew who we were and we stood by each other no matter what. Me and him were nothing but laughs and smiles. That’s all it was.”

He remembers his friend as an outgoing, heartwarming person.

“He never did you wrong or turned his back on you. He was always respectful, never lied and was a straight-A student,” he said. “It tears me apart. I’m not going to lie. I still don’t believe it.”

Roman said he will never forget his friend’s smile — the same thing one of Montoya’s sisters said in a phone interview.

“The one thing that I miss about him that I’m just dying to hear again is his laugh,” the broken-hearted friend said.

Montoya’s body is expected to arrive in the Rio Grande Valley sometime next week. Ric Brown Family Funeral Home in Mission will provide the funeral services and he will be buried at Rio Grande Valley State Veterans Cemetery, also in Mission.