GLENDALE, Ariz. — “Every day we wake up it’s a living nightmare. It was the worst mass shooting in United States history and we were involved.”
White Sox minor leaguer Mikey Duarte is back in Glendale, the same place he was almost five months ago when he was got a call that sent him racing out of his hotel room in the middle of the night. On the other end of the line was his mom, telling him that there had been a shooting at a concert his younger sister Christiana Duarte was at in Las Vegas, the Oct. 1 concert he had a ticket for, but wound up not attending.
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“‘Mikey, I can’t find ‘Cheekies,’ there was a shooting at the concert,'” Duarte said his mom told him. “I lost it. I was in my hotel room, I ran out with my boxers on, nothing on, no shoes, nothing, and…booked it to Vegas. Drove 110 mph and didn’t stop. I was honking at cops to stop me so I wouldn’t do anything stupid, and the time that I needed someone to stop me, no one stopped me. The time that I was really doing something illegal, no one stopped me.”
Duarte is speaking about the night his sister, his best friend in the world, was among 58 people murdered in the worst mass shooting in American history to head off any attention he might get. A 23rd-round draft pick last year, he’s due to report to White Sox minor league camp to keep playing the sport he and his sister loved, on March 6, and when that day comes he wants to just be a baseball player. But he’s also talking, kneading rosary beads in his hand the whole time, because it makes him feel better, as difficult as that is to imagine.
“No one knew I was driving,” Duarte said of his desperate pursuit. “Everyone said ‘Where are you?’ I said ‘At the hotel.’ Thirty minutes out and they couldn’t find her still, I told my mom, ‘Mom, I’m here.’ She said ‘What?’ I said ‘I’m here.’ We stopped at a couple hospitals on the way, put her name in, sent her picture to everybody. No luck. Then I got to my parents, they’re sitting on a hospital praying on their knees, the rosary. It was a movie, like the worst movie you could see. And that was it.”
On Oct. 5, Derek Forbort and the rest of the Los Angeles Kings wore helmets with initials CD in honor of Kings employee Christiana Duarte who was killed Oct. 1 in the Las Vegas shooting. (Harry How/Getty Images)Duarte was in Glendale for instructional league after getting drafted out of UC-Irvine in June. He bought the tickets for the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival and encouraged his sister to come along with him, a twist of fate that leaves him blaming himself and still repeating “It should have been me.” But it so happened he was at the Sox complex getting checked out and cleared because of the brush with death he endured a couple months earlier.
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In his second game with the Great Falls Voyagers in rookie ball, Duarte, playing shortstop, was struck in the head by a relay throw from right field. The impact fractured his skull, creating 12 bone fragments and internal bleeding. He was sent home from the emergency room without surgery. A checkup two weeks later left doctors stunned that he was still alive.
“One of the fragments got stuck in the blood vessel to keep me from not bleeding out,” Duarte said. “[The doctor] said during the surgery that I should have died that moment [the ball struck] and he doesn’t know why that little fragment got stuck in the blood vessel to keep me from bleeding out. The moment of impact. He said that, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ And then three weeks after that my sister dies in Las Vegas. I know there’s a reason beyond baseball to live for.”
Duarte wants to have a family, a daughter to name Christiana. He plans on having his sister’s name on all his bats and on his glove. He will wear purple shoelaces in her honor if the White Sox will allow it. But at the same time, he is skeptical about the importance of any of these superficial gestures in the face of much deeper sadness. He says that baseball is the best medicine, and that he’s playing from here on out for her — a first-team all-conference softball player in high school — but there isn’t an easy motivational conclusion for Duarte’s grief, still raw and pulsing under his skin after five months. Asked how he got through the first month, and the answer from Duarte isn’t faith, or baseball, or anything easy.
“You want to know the truth? Alcohol. Alcohol,” Duarte said. “I’ve stepped away from that two months ago. Honestly, I drank every night and I drank a lot to wonder why it wasn’t me. I think about it now. Why I wasn’t the one dead? I would do anything to just press a button and she’d come alive because she was so happy, so perfect. She had such a bright future. She was so excited. She worked for the Rams, she was working for AEG, for the Kings, she had a bright future and I would do anything to have her back. That’s why I always tweet, ‘Hug your brothers and your sisters and your moms and dads and don’t ever not talk to someone because you’re having a rough day.’ Always appreciate and love them because you don’t know what tomorrow brings or even tonight. Especially in this crazy country, especially in this crazy world we live in.”
Duarte’s parents are coming back with him for spring training. His games have always been a regular attraction for their family, back when Christiana was playfully chiding her older brother about whether or not his name would get called on draft day. Just being in pro camp is the realization of a dream come true that his parents supported his entire life, but Duarte says “They’ll never be good again.” Not after they dropped their 22-year-old daughter off at a concert and were playing slot machines as she was killed. Losing a child in any way can break people, but these circumstances are especially grim.
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No sane person has weighed in on the plague of mass shootings and said anything less than “something needs to change,” and Duarte also eases himself into the topic. But while recalling the horrible night, and his grief is agonizing, he gets a certain momentum when talking about what a good athlete his sister was, how successful she was going to be, and how he feels about what hasn’t been done since her death.
“There’s no reason that a school should be shot up with 17 kids dead,” Duarte said. “A church, 26 people dead. A concert in Las Vegas, 58 dead. It just keeps happening over and over again and it’s not going to stop until our people high up do something about it. And yeah, I think there’s no reason to have a semi-automatic weapon. There’s no reason to have an AR-15. If you need to protect your home, you should be able to have a pistol at your house, to protect someone if they break in your house. There’s no reason to have an AR-15 or a bump stock weapon to kill hundreds of people at a time. There’s no reason. So yeah, I think something needs to be done to help your kids and my kids one day, live in a safer environment.
“People keep tweeting the same stuff over and over again after a mass shooting and nothing’s done. Sorry it happened. Thoughts and prayers to the families that lost someone today. But what have you done to prevent it? You’re high up, you have every resource to do something about it and nothing is ever done besides a tweet. And what’s a tweet, really? A tweet is just a tweet. That’s just some words coming out of the mouth. I think something needs to be done to make this country safer.”
The White Sox aren’t delusional. They’ve never handled a player battling such intense grief from such a horrific event, and they can’t fill the hole in Duarte’s heart. But whatever benefit being part of a team can offer to someone who feels like a major part of him will always be missing, they’re going to provide for him.
“You really treat every kid like your own,” said player development director Chris Getz. “At least the staff here looks at it like that way. You love and support him in whatever he needs.
“He told me earlier in the day, he feels in a way it allows him to tell the story, a tribute to his sister and it makes him feel better. When we had discussions, I let him speak and obviously just try to show as much love as I can, really. Do I have the best advice? I’m really kind of a sounding board, that’s the approach I take. He needs to speak, he has someone to talk to.”
(Top photo: James Fegan/The Athletic)
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