He returns to the scene of the crime every day: a small corner store at Carson and Fourth, with a bright interior showcasing a collection of jewelry, porcelain, furs and trinkets. Del Prado sets up the store, as his mother, Elisa Del Prado, and grandmother, Juana Quiroga, were doing that morning. He removes trays of jewelry from safes, places the trays on the glass display cases and places the pieces on their soft cushions. Every morning the 44-year-old opens the door and allows his jeweler into that store, as they did. Every day, he's reminded that his mother won't be joining him.
Del Prado's hands define what he loves. They're covered in gold—big, shiny, bawdy gold. On his index finger is an old, rare Cuban coin, larger than a quarter, surrounded by two-carat diamonds. It speaks his love of his Cuban heritage. On his ring finger, more gold and diamonds: a III in three-carat diamonds, for his name. It illustrates his family pride and identity. And on his pinkie ring, the gold piles up in a domelike structure, with lines delineating a stack of bricks. That's for his foundation, the family store built out of love and hard work. Almost thirty years of toil.
As his rings suggest, Del Prado is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. His character is blunt, but passionate. He won't stand for hiding emotion or opinion, and he doesn't particularly care what you think of him. Stocky and thick around the waist, wearing a loose, navy Hawaiian shirt dotted with palm trees, he stands at the head of the store on a warm day in April, eating out of a Styrofoam bowl. It's a lunch that doesn't even hint at health, body consciousness or haute cuisine: BBQ potato chips and a fried chicken patty, all of which he smears with a spoonful of strawberry jelly before placing it in his mouth, smacking in delight. Dainty he isn't.
What he is is a born salesman. Jingles, slogans and pitches tumble out of his mouth as he promotes his products, his service, his lay-away plan. A loving husband and father, John is now also a grieving son and grandson, a family store owner and a survivor.
Following the attack, Elisa Del Prado lingered in a coma. John closed World Merchants-Importers for two weeks so he could spend 18 hours a day at his mother's hospital bedside. She was damaged but strong. Though she'd undergone such massive head trauma that her son would one day move his hands in a lattice-work fashion during a hearing to describe the appearance of her skull, she withstood numerous brain surgeries. She was even able to breath on her own, and the family waited.
John stopped by the store every couple of days and gathered the cards and flowers that friends and customers left. And he'd enter the store, taking in the back room, where the signs of the struggle still remained. An overturned bucket. Glass cases smashed by a fire extinguisher. Blood, of course. "When I walked in here, the blood was still back in that room," he says quietly. "There was so much blood, everywhere. It was like a half an inch off the carpet." The carpet has been replaced. But not the memory.
After those 14 days, he had to return to work. "I wasn't going to let what this individual did to her close us down. ... And I told my brother and my sister at the time, 'You guys, I'm going to go work the store, and I'll come back up here when I get off, and I'll go home and sleep, and then I'm going to go work the store, and I'm going to open up the store. I'm not going to let my mom and my dad's dream fall apart over what happened here. I'm going to keep the store alive and I'm going to keep it open.' And I've done that."
Except for three days in early March, when the store closed again. His mother's stomach had shut down, and doctors removed the feeding tube. Again, John spent day and night by her bedside, refusing to let his mom to die alone.
"We sell everything you'd love to have but nothing you need!" It's a sunny day in early April, seven months since the attack. John belts it out in good spirits, wildly gesturing toward the fur department, which is actually a large closet with the coats of many species: fox, chinchilla, mink, beaver, lamb, coyote. It's one of his many slogans, always followed by laughter so raucous and genuine you'd have to be hard-hearted to not join in. But even that phrase has taken on new meaning since that September morning.
Elisa Del Prado arrived at work around 9:20 in the morning. The soft-spoken woman opened the safes and took out trays of necklaces, rings and bracelets, stacking them on the clean glass display cases and setting the jewelry in its place. Her mother, Juana Quiroga, sat in a chair as her daughter prepared for the day's business.
That morning, for whatever reason, a man did need those jewels. Needed them so badly that in broad daylight, less than a mile from a police station, a block from the courthouse, in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on Fourth Street, he picked up that hammer, ready to exchange two lives for a few pockets of emeralds, rubies and diamonds, retailed at $200,000.
Though the actual attack was not caught on tape—it happened in the repair room, where there was no camera—the events surrounding it were. Witnesses to the tape and police called to the crime scene reconstructed the event during the pretrial hearing of Avetis Archanian—the store's jeweler and repairman, who is charged in the murder.
At 9:21 a.m., a man wearing dark clothing knocks or buzzes on the front door of the store and is let in. He's carrying a briefcase in his left hand and speaks briefly with Elisa. According to Detective Jeff Rosgen, who's viewed the surveillance tape, the two appeared to be familiar with each other.
The man heads back into the repair room. A few minutes later, Elisa stops setting up jewelry and looks toward the repair room, then walks back there. Seconds later, something catches Juana's attention. She cocks her head, stands up and walks back to the repair room. She's briefly out of sight, then reappears, feebly attempting to move quickly. But she doesn't get far. A man in a dark shirt drags Juana—who's unable to get out of the car unaided—back toward the repair room. Her lower legs and feet remain in view, kicking uselessly. Then they're still.
A few minutes pass. Then the man, briefcase in hand, steps over the body and walks across into a back hallway that leads to an office, where there's a VCR, and removes what he most likely thinks is the business' sole surveillance video. He crosses the store again, walking to a safe that sits by the repair room, but he's unable to open it. So he moves to the display cases, where Elisa had left the trays of jewelry, and begins shoving pieces into a bag, carelessly throwing the empty cases on the ground. He picks up a fire extinguisher and smashes through the glass display cases, grabbing more jewelry.
The man walks across the store again, going down a hallway across from the repair room where the two women are lying, bleeding, and walks into a bathroom. He turns on a faucet, which will still be running when the police arrive. When he returns to the store's main area, something spooks him. On the tape, it appears to be a police car passing outside. He hides behind a pillar and a mannequin that stand in the middle of the store, waiting. Satisfied that they're gone, he pushes open the door and leaves the store, going north on Fourth Street, towards Fitzgeralds, then west on Carson. Around 9:40 he disappears from view.
Ten minutes later, the 46-year-old Archanian shows up for work, as he had for the last three weeks, since he was hired to work in the store (He'd worked with them for three months prior to that, but only off-premises). He walks east up Carson and then south down Fourth Street to the front door of the jewelry store, where he rings the bell and knocks on the door. After a minute or two, when there's no answer, he walks south, toward the windows that look into the repair room. He disappears from the camera's view again. But soon he's back, and then gone, and then back as though he's pacing in front of the store. In this time, a police van drives by. Then a police car. Two motorcycle cops stop at a red light in front of the store. The man makes no attempt to approach them.
Archanian's off camera when a woman walks up to the front door and rings the bell. He approaches and appears to be talking to her, pointing in the direction of the repair room, where, were anyone to look through the bars on the window, two bodies are in plain view. Then he gets on his cell phone. Dials 911 and reports that there appears to be an injured woman inside the store, and then hands the cell phone to the woman.
After several minutes, a police officer runs up and looks through the door. A fire truck arrives and the firemen bust through a window, using drills to remove the metal bars. Four police officers enter, securing the store. Once they're satisfied there's no immediate danger, Officer Tracy Smith rushes over to the Juana and Elisa. She knows immediately that Juana is dead. When she looks at Elisa—who had been hit 10 or 15 times with the hammer—she thinks the same thing. Then the victim's fingers move.
The room is small, and in such disarray that a gurney can't fit. They bring in a board to lift Elisa. And while transferring her to the board, an instrument falls out of her head. "The instrument was black in color like a long—it looked like, I imagine, probably about 18 inches long. It looked like an iron. I actually thought it was the handle of a hammer," Smith said at the pre-trial hearing. In fact, it was a ring-sizer, a long, wand-like instrument with a circle on the end to determine how large a finger is.
Outside of the store, John has arrived. He was called by the building manager. Something awful has happened. The building is now surrounded by crime tape, and the police won't let him into his family's store. "Some detective came in and talked to me and said 'Listen. One person is dead. And one person has been transported to the hospital and we don't know if they're going to live.'" It was more than an hour before he learned his mother is injured and his grandmother has died.
Around that time, Archanian asks the police if he can call John, his boss, to express his condolences and see how Elisa's doing. The officer decides against giving him the phone number, because, at this point, he's a suspect. The police question him, then let him go.
It takes a couple of hours for the police to obtain the surveillance tape from a private security company. Though the attacker had taken a tape from the office VCR, there was another system in action. When they view that footage, they see that the man who'd left the store is wearing the same dark clothing as Archanian. His head is the same shape, as are his glasses, and he has an identical hairline.
They find him at a gas station near his home. There are two Ziplock bags of jewelry in his car, blood, too, on an armrest, and on the rear door. There's also blood on his clothing, which they hadn't noticed during questioning, and jewelry in his pocket. He's since been charged with murder, attempted murder, robbery and burglary, all with the use of a deadly weapon, and grand larceny. He faces the death penalty. This week, the district attorney will go before a grand jury and request that a second murder charge be filed, according to Greg Knapp, a deputy district attorney. Archanian in remains Clark County Detention Center without bail awaiting his November trial. His defense counsel declined comment.
Every day, John goes back. But it's not just the family business that keeps him plowing ahead. Nothing's that simple. If blood binds him to his mother's dreams, it also binds him to her anger, to the bitter torch she passed onto him and that he's intent upon carrying—a grudge against the city. It's a sidebar to the murder, but one that John allows to take center-stage in his life. It's easier that way. More tangible.
The Del Prado family moved to the United States from Cuba in 1962, after Fidel Castro took over their family business. In 1975, they opened a jewelry store in Commercial Center, and later moved it to Fremont Street, where there was more foot traffic. After a successful run in the early '90s, his parents opened a second Fremont Street location, and John became heavily involved in helping with the family business. He ran one store and his father ran another, until his father became sick with Hepatitis, a disease that eventually killed him.
Then came the redevelopment of Fremont Street. The city gave the family 30 days and what Del Prado describes as "bargain-basement dollars" to get out so the building of the Fremont Street Experience could begin. He and his mother moved the store to its current location at the corner of Carson and Fourth Street, which is diagonal from the Neonopolis parking garage. But after three years of construction, dust and no sidewalk in front of the store, business is hurting. He blames the city.
"My mother was very, very passionate about the city doing the right thing and moving us back down to Fremont Street. She felt when she came to America, she left Cuba because of what happened there, with Castro taking over her family business. She came to America, land of the free and home of the brave, opportunity for everyone. Well, if you work hard and you're honest, you can get ahead in America. Well, we worked hard, we were honest and we got ahead, to have it all taken away by the city to build a parking lot. And she was very, very bitter with the city because of that."
So he pushes away the pain of the attack, moves past the horror of the family blood spilled in the family store, steers away from questions about murder and hammers and focuses on injustice. There was nothing he could do to stop the murder of his grandmother. Nothing he could do to save his mother. But here, at least, he can try to do something. He's turned all of his energy, all of his grief into an effort to get the city to pay move him back to a location on Fremont Street, where the store belongs. God help him if that effort fails and he has to face the prospect of his family's store going out of business, dissolving their last physical connection.
All the deflection and redirection and anger in the world can't push the real pain away. Not every day, anyway. And certainly not the time when his 6-year-old son approached him soon after the attack, demanding to know what had really happened that day.
"I had told my son that grandmamma had been hurt in the store, and that she's at the hospital and that things are serious. And, 6 years old, he said, 'What happened?' I said she got hurt. That's all I said.
His friends saw it on the news and told him that his grandmamma got her head bashed in with a hammer from some guy who tried to rob the store. So he came back and asked. I said, 'Where did you get that from?' He said his friends told him. That grandmamma's head is gone. And I went, 'No honey, but somebody did attack grandmamma.'"
Eight months have passed. John's constructed and reconstructed the attack. Fumed because this man chose a time when he wouldn't be there to protect his family. Wondered, were his store in a different location, making more money, whether he would have even hired this jeweler, whose rates were cheaper than his predecessor's. But he knows that dwelling is futile. Now it's a matter of picking up the pieces, making the store his own, moving on.
"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead," he says flatly. "Life sucks. Things are going to happen in your life that you feel are unfair. Things are going to happen in your life that you would not be able to overcome. And reality has to set in ... I'm the captain of the ship, I'll either ride it into port or I'll ride it all the way to the bottom of the ocean."
His new jeweler, of all people, has been instrumental in his healing. John found Kip Corp through friends, and was understandably wary at first. But Kip, an old hippie with a kind heart who specializes in deadpan delivery, quickly took on the role of therapist and friend. Corp's mother had recently died from cancer, so he could at least partially empathize with John.
"He's been through a lot," Corp says in his soft monotone. "He's been through a lot. And he was the oldest, firstborn, so was I, I know what that's like, you're very special to mom, and his mom died. But when she finally passed, he was OK with it. I was, too. Cancer, or like his mom lying in the hospital in a coma, it's no way to live. So death is a relief, not a horror. The horror story happened in September. Her death was a godsend."
Corp has been slowly but firmly encouraging John to make the store his own. Get rid of the furs, the fake plants, the sequin-dressed mannequins that tinge the place with musty femininity. Plaques recognizing Elisa's community involvement and awards for the store still decorate the place, but the pictures of Juana and Elisa that once lined the walls, sitting in front of vases and near the cash register, have less of a presence in mid-April than they did just two weeks earlier. John's striving to keep his mother in his heart—not in his store.
"He fights me all the way," Corp says. "But I'm slowly but surely getting him to stand up and take control, make it his store. Now, now it's a man's store filled with things men wouldn't really put in a jewelry store, so we're working on maybe altering the market. I may be guilty of manipulating a little bit, but what I feel is the right path."
In the repair room, surrounded by a jewelers tools—a flame for metalwork, wrenches, scissors, hammers, ring-sizers—a dusty crucifix hangs on the wall. A collection of nutcrackers line the shelves. A safe sits in the corner. Steve Miller Band's "Living in the USA" streams from the radio. John flits in and deviously shouts, "Ah, he took you into the pit! This is where DREAMS come true. He's the dream master." He laughs, almost maniacally, with the passion and intensity that mark his every utterance. John grabs whatever he came into the room for and is gone. Moving on to the next task, the next customer, the next piece of business. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.