Sandor was murdered in the San Juan neighborhood at midday on June 14. As his mother explains, “We were there helping the other people from the block who were putting up barricades. It was a small barricade. He was inside, but he hears all the noise and standing in the doorway he asks me, ‘Mom, can I help you?’ ‘No,’ I tell him, ‘We’ve finished now.’ ‘And those things (the paving blocks used to make the barricade), are they heavy?’ he asks. I told my sister to give him one to try and he went down into the middle of the street. ‘No, this isn’t heavy,’ he told us. When we finished we stayed at the corner with a lot of people. There were loads of us.”

When the paramilitaries burst onto the scene firing their weapons, the people began running. “‘Run,’ I tell Sandor, but they’d already shot him,” recalls Ivania Dolmus. “We took him into the house and when I looked at him I saw a bit of blood on his undershirt. We immediately put him in the pick-up truck and he was still alive when he reached the hospital.”

The doctor there, Oscar Danilo Rosales, said that the bullet had not touched his heart or his lungs, but he had to be operated on to save his life. They took him to the operating theater in the elevator while his mom went up the stairs and waited for the results praying in front of an image of the Sacred Heart. Ivania does not know how long she spent praying, but she does remember having a bad feeling when she heard a voice asking, “Dolmus family?” Then the doctor told Sandor’s mother that her son had not made it through the surgery.

According to the death certificate, Sandor died from a bullet wound to the chest. Ivania says that the people at the hospital did not want to hand over the body until the Police and the medical examiner arrived. However, she would not allow the medical examiner to touch his body and took him from the hospital as soon as the coffin arrived. “I told them ‘No, why’s he (the medical examiner) going to come, if they’re the ones that killed him? And I don’t even want to see them here,’” she explains. “‘OK, then I’ll fix him up,’ the doctor tells me.’ ‘No, don’t even fix him up, don’t touch him! I’m taking him!’”

After the wake, a mass was held with the body present in the Cathedral. When they came out, Sandor’s altar-boy friends carried the coffin, draped with a Nicaraguan flag, on their shoulders. As the funeral procession made its way toward the Guadalupe Cemetery, people swept the streets and removed the barricades so that the boy martyr could pass. The San Sebastián and Guadalupe churches tolled their bells in mourning.

His mother still asks herself, “Who gave the order to kill him? A child couldn’t harm anyone…”