Airman Luis Vazquez of Alliance was killed three months ago by a fellow serviceman. That much is known. His family has a lot of questions but few answers. Not from the county sheriff in Missouri where their son's body was found. Not from Air Force investigators. The only one answering their questions is a psychic.
It was a few days after her son's burial. Rosa Vazquez, alone at her family's Alliance home, wanted some background noise to keep her company. So she turned on the TV.
This isn't a funny story, but she thinks you'll probably laugh at what happened next.
The Biography Channel -- which she never watches -- was airing a show called "Psychic Investigators." For some reason, she didn't keep clicking.
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On screen, a woman explained how she solved a murder using a sixth sense, Vazquez said.
"I started listening to what this girl was saying."
Vazquez knows more about her son's death than do the families of most slain servicemen and servicewomen. She knows the name of her son's killer, and that he'll never kill again.
But she doesn't know why this man -- not an enemy combatant, but a fellow airman -- took her son's life.
Maybe, she thought, this seer on TV could give her an explanation. No one else had.
* * *
Airman Luis Vazquez left Whiteman Air Force Base in central Missouri late Jan. 9, a Sunday. A fellow airman, Kerby Barbe, had asked for a ride in his pickup, the one with baby blue paint and camouflage trim.
It was coat weather, but Vazquez left the base wearing jeans, his tennis shoes and his blue Alliance High School sweatshirt. He already had taken a shower, brushed his teeth and put in his retainer. He planned to be back soon, his mom said.
He did not show up for work the next day.
That Tuesday, Barbe drove the baby blue pickup to a friend's home near San Antonio, Texas, then shot and killed himself after a standoff outside.
Three days later, about noon on Friday, a search team found Vazquez's snow-covered body in a state park across the highway from Whiteman, about 70 miles southeast of downtown Kansas City, Mo. He had been shot in the head and shoulder.
His mother says Air Force personnel shared plenty of consoling words: "They were so supportive and helpful. ... If they didn't find him, it was going to be a question forever."
That one question is answered, but more remain for Rosa Vazquez and her husband, Manuel.
They never knew Barbe, who trained with their son at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio. The airmen had been on base together in Missouri for about a month but were more acquaintances than friends.
Then again, Luis was friends with everyone, his parents say.
"You could put him in a room full of strangers, and before the end of the day, he would know all of them," his mother said.
Which makes it all the more baffling that someone would want to kill her son.
Chuck Heiss, sheriff in Johnson County, Mo., said he doesn't have an explanation. His investigators have run out of leads.
"We were very candid with the families in terms of what we found, and that's our style," he said.
The Air Force, which is doing its own investigation, seized a laptop and other electronics from Vazquez's room, as well as the GPS from his pickup. If emails, instant messages or anything else from those devices shed light on the shooting, Air Force investigators haven't shared the information with Heiss, he said.
A Whiteman spokesman referred questions about the investigation to the sheriff.
Linda Card, public affairs director for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, said more information will be released once the investigation is completed. She said she didn't know how long that will take.
"I know the families are anxious to hear the end of whatever's going on," Card said.
Luis Vazquez's parents both serve in the Army, based out of Colorado. He's a corporal in a tactical psychological operations unit, and she's a dental assistant with the rank of staff sergeant. But their military status hasn't given them insight into the Air Force's investigation.
"We are extremely frustrated with the system," Manuel Vazquez said. "There's really no justice for us."
They have spoken with an investigator a handful of times in the past few months and have asked for a copy of everything pertaining to their son's death -- autopsy results, emails and other evidence -- but nothing has been sent.
Rosa Vazquez said she hopes Barbe will be the subject of a court-martial, even though he's dead.
She wants to know how he got a loaded rifle off base without anyone raising a red flag. Airmen aren't permitted to carry loaded personal firearms at Whiteman.
The Vazquezes also think Barbe wanted to do more damage than he did. No one needs the 300 rounds of ammunition found in their son's truck to kill one person, they reason.
The gun he used -- which investigators believe he bought at the Whiteman base exchange that Sunday afternoon -- carries a 15- or 30-round magazine.
If Barbe planned to attack people on base, "that would be strictly a military issue," Heiss said. "Good luck getting that out of the Air Force."
Neither Air Force spokesperson would comment.
"It makes me think that they are not gonna tell us the whole truth because it looks bad," Rosa Vazquez says. "They give us little pieces, but we really don't know what was behind all this."
* * *
Nebraska's new veterans cemetery in Alliance opened early for Luis Vazquez, allowing a hometown serviceman to be the first buried there.
"They were so generous with us," his mother said of the cemetery staff.
Their church in Alliance was almost full for the wake. A day later at the funeral, 500 people signed the guest book, Rosa Vazquez said, and others told her they didn't get a chance.
Her son's friends still leave messages on his Facebook page. They still email her about him, too, she said.
"Every single place in the house has his memory. ... We can still see him running upstairs," his mother said. "It is so hard to understand that he is not here.
"We know that Luis was a good boy."
She and her husband have raised their younger son, 12-year-old Jose, to be a good boy, too.
"We think that by raising good kids, they are safe," she said. "How can somebody hurt somebody so nice -- that never, never hurt anybody?"
The psychic, Vicki Monroe of Portland, Maine, told the parents that Barbe envied their son, and that their son died because of Barbe's jealousy.
Now, Rosa Vazquez worries her kids' upbringing might have made them targets. And Jose wants to join the Air Force.
"At first," his mother said, "it gave me the chills."
She didn't want to lose another son.
"But then the psychic also said to tell my son that the Air Force was good, it's just some people."
Yes, the psychic. She knows it might sound funny, she said, "but we take it as fact."
"The only answers we have were from the psychic."
