Calling hours were held Friday for a Massachusetts State Police recruit who died after a training mishap at the state police academy earlier this month.
Loved ones gathered in Worcester Friday afternoon for Enrique Delgado-Garcia's wake. His funeral will be held on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. He will receive full state police honors for the service.
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"He was just a great person," Andrew Howard, a former coworker of Delgado-Garcia, said at his calling hours.
Delgado-Garcia, 25, died after sustaining injuries including missing teeth, a damaged skull and a fractured neck while participating in a boxing training exercise designed to teach defense tactics. That exercise has now been suspended, and State Police Lt. Col. John Mawn has directed the agency's Division of Standards and Training to review the state police academy's defensive tactics program.
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On Monday, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell named attorney David Meier to lead an independent investigation into Delgado-Garcia's death. The Worcester County District Attorney's Office had previously said that it could not conduct the investigation because Delgado-Garcia used to work as a victim witness advocate in their office.
Democratic State Sens. Michael Moore and Robyn Kennedy were among the lawmakers who called for Campbell to appoint a special investigator.
"We all wish that the decision could've been made sooner to do it," said Moore. "We understand it was going to take some time to pick an independent council."
"We're going to continue to work with the state police, with the outside investigator, to do everything we can in our power to make sure they have the answers," Kennedy added.
Ahead of his services, Delgado-Garcia's family spoke exclusively with NBC10 Boston. They still have a lot of questions about his death.
Sandra Garcia says her son always wanted to dedicate himself to helping others. When he told her that he was interested in law enforcement, she said she worried for his safety but, as a family, they supported his dream.
The last time Garcia spoke to her son, she caught him as he was leaving home at dawn for the State Police Academy — just weeks away from graduating.
The next time she saw him was in the hospital.
Garcia says she was told that Delgado-Garcia was hit in the head and lost consciousness, telling NBC10 Boston and Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra in Spanish that all of her son's teeth were broken and that he had bruises on his body. Her heart tells her there was "great negligence" involved.
With an independent investigator now taking on the case, Garcia says she wants transparency and to know what happened, because with so much damage done, she believes it was something strange.
She also believes the department should change its training: "That training is too brutal and it doesn’t have to lead to a case where an agent has to die, because I think that the police don’t go out to box, rather to try to help the community. It’s fine if a moment presents itself where they have to defend themselves, but they don’t need to implement so much aggression to those young men that it leads to the death of one of their own.”
Delgado-Garcia's stepfather, Jose Perez, says he will remember the man as a warrior, who fought until his final day for his values and his dream.
"I think my heart will always, until the last day of my life, will think of this young man that, at his young age, he could do what many who have many more years have not been able to achieve," Perez said.
"I just hope that they hold somebody accountable for this, because we could barely keep it together in there," Howard said Friday.
