A Light That Won’t Go Out

There are people in this world who insist on seeing the good in others, the way some men insist on petting a strange dog with bad manners. It is a generous habit and is also, on occasion, a dangerous one.

Tabatha Tozzi was such a person. Her friends called her a light, and by all accounts, she behaved like one, shining freely, asking nothing, and improving the look of everything she touched. She was 26 when she was shot and killed in April of 2023, which is an age better suited for bad decisions than final ones.

Each year since, her family and friends have gathered to remember her, part memorial, part stubborn act of refusal. They refuse to forget her, and they refuse to let the law forget the man accused of killing her, one Oswaldo Perez-Sanchez, who fled south and now sits in a Mexican prison, having allegedly proven twice what decent people prefer to believe only once.

Her mother, Regina Gomes, speaks of Tabatha the way mothers do when memory has to carry more weight than a living daughter ever should. She says Tabatha saw the good in people, always the good, and she adds, with a clarity that would make a judge envious, that this very virtue cost her child her life. It is a hard sentence, but a sensible one. The world, regrettably, does not grade on kindness.

There is something quietly remarkable in what remains. Friends who might have drifted off into their own concerns instead show up, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, like clockwork.

One friend says Tabatha taught her how to be affectionate, which is no small act in a society that prefers its feelings well-disguised. Another says a piece of Tabatha lives on in her child, which is about as close as we come to immortality without filing paperwork.

Meanwhile, justice, like an old mule, is still being coaxed across the border. The Clark County District Attorney’s Office continues its efforts to bring Perez-Sanchez back to Las Vegas, where accusations are to meet consequences. Until then, he remains in a maximum-security jail in Mexico, accused in yet another killing, an ugly sort of consistency that requires no embellishment.

Back in Nevada, Gomes keeps her daughter’s memory alive with the sort of determination that does not ask permission. She has her daughter’s dog, Lulu, and, by her own account, she still holds hope. That is no small inventory in a world that tends to misplace both.

She says she may have a mission now, to help others, to warn the young and the trusting that goodness is a fine trait, but not a shield. It is the kind of lesson nobody wants, and everybody needs.

In the end, Tabatha Tozzi’s light persists inconveniently; it refuses to go out quietly. And if it troubles the darkness a little longer, that may be the closest thing to justice available while the law catches up.