This grieving mother is courageously philosophical in dealing with her profoundly tragic loss. “We’ve heard a lot of people refer to this as a horrible freak act of nature, but to me it wasn’t a freak accident,” she says. “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The lightning came out of nowhere. God chose to pick him. I won’t understand in this life, but I know I will see him again, and then I will understand.”
Mrs. Chavez-Munoz says Phillip was a generous child who “always wanted to help people.” She is certain that he would have wanted to donate his organs.
The four people who received Phillip’s organ’s are indebted to him. But so are we all. The most fitting way for anyone to pay that debt is to follow his example and become an organ donor. All that is required to achieve that status is to inform immediate family members and to identify oneself as an organ donor on a driver’s license.
Mrs. Chavez-Munoz, her husband, Alfredo, and the couple’s two surviving children, Andres and Kayla, now face huge medical bills and funeral costs. Union Grove Baptist Church of Seagrove, where Phillip was put to rest, has established a fund to help the family with those expenses. Please give.
Anyone with an emotional reluctance to become an organ donor should heed the words of Linda Chavez-Munoz: “It’s not easy going through this, but it brings comfort to read the letters, just to know that somebody else could be saved. I feel it is something that everybody would do. I do not know the age of the persons who received his kidneys. It doesn’t matter. It saved their lives. People that had darkness in their lives have light. Now they can see. People that could have died have life.”
Phillip Chavez-Munoz light and life will shine forever.
...A Legacy of Shame
The mark left on the world by Timothy McVeigh stands in horrific contrast to that of Phillip Chavez-Munoz. The lunatic perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing that slaughtered 168 innocent men, women and children drew his last breath Monday morning on the executioner’s gurney in Terre Haute, Ind. By even the most charitable standard, his life served little if any useful purpose.
Neither did his death. McVeigh may have deserved to die, but it would have been better for him to rot in prison for the rest of his life, reflecting on the evil he wrought. By putting him to death, the federal criminal justice system unwittingly conferred on him a degree of the martyrdom he sought. His execution gives aid and comfort to the fascist conspiracy theorists. And McVeigh’s crimes against humanity give additional ammunition to those who favor the death penalty, but imposing capital punishment on him doesn’t erase the Oklahoma City holocaust. It doesn’t bring back any of the people he butchered.
Fittingly, the outrage over McVeigh’s barbarism has dealt a telling blow to the militia movement in the United States. Any public sympathy for militia groups that may have resulted from the government’s actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco were obliterated by McVeigh, the movement’s premier madman. His actions exposed paramilitary extremism for the insanity that it is.
Debate will continue over whether McVeigh was the point man in a wider conspiracy that resulted in the Oklahoma City bombing. There will be continued disagreement over whether his execution was morally appropriate. On one thing, however, just about everyone will agree: Timothy McVeigh will not be missed.
