Autry Flores

The story of my life actually starts years before I was even born. My parents, Cynthia and Francisco, met when they were in 8th grade and have been together ever since. When they were in 9th grade, they were blessed with a surprise when my mom found out she was pregnant with my big brother, Dominique Francisco Flores. Not long after that in 1991, my mom had to move to Germany, with her family, for seven months while my dad stayed in Arizona. Together, they decided to move back in order to complete school and join the class of '92 in their graduation ceremony.

My parents were married on December 16, 1994, and later my dad joined the army in 1995 at the age of 21. When he returned from basic training, my parents decided they wanted another child. Who would have thought that just a short year later, their prayers would be answered.

At 4:00 pm on May 10, 1996, my mom went into labor. She was taken to Bayne Jones Army Medical Center in Fort Polk, Louisiana. My parents had planned to have me but didn’t quite plan for me to be a boy. They thought they were having a baby girl and prepared for this little girl they were going to name, "Estrella" (Es-tray-uh). Instead, at 6:07 pm on May 10, 1996, my mom gave birth, to me, a baby boy with black hair, dark brown eyes, light skin and weighing seven pounds, eight ounces. The doctor even allowed my dad to deliver me.

After realizing Estrella wasn't going to work, my dad picked my name. He chose, "Autry", after a famous college football player named "Harrington Darnell Autry". While trying to think of a middle name for me, the nurse came in and collected the birth certificate before they could finish filling it out. So, to this day, I still do not have a middle name.

My family brought me home, where we lived on the post in Fort Polk, Louisiana, and introducde me to my brother, "Dominique" and my dog, "Bully". My brother has watched over me since the day I was born and even helped baby sit me a lot. My dog "Bully" was also very close to me. He was protective of me and would not let any people he did not know, go near me. He even slept under my crib when I was sleeping as a baby. I don't really remember much of him today, but I feel very thankful that I had him as a companion.

Three months after I was born, my family and I went on a road trip from Louisiana to Arizona, where I had the chance to be held by my Great-Grandfather, Earnie Corona before he passed away. My Family and I lived in Fort Polk for two more years until 1998, before moving to El Paso, TX. The only memory I have of living in Louisiana, is riding in our car, seeing the streets flooded with rainwater.

After three years of living at Fort Polk, Louisiana, the military sent my dad to Texas, where we would then call home. We could not take our dog "Bully" with us when we moved because we were going to stay in my Grandfather Robert's house while we were getting settled. We found Bully another home and when Bully met his next owner, he ran right up to the guy, that made my mom happy. My family and I lived In Texas for almost two years until 1999. I attended Preschool as a "Bumble Bee" and my teacher’s name was Ms. Irmgard. In 2000, when I was four years old, I attended Pre-Kindergarten and even learned to ride a bike. During Preschool and Kindergarten, I was afraid of going to school and cried every morning when I went on the bus.

My favorite memory of living in Texas was going to the swap meet in Mexico to go eat "Elote" a Mexican style corn on the cob; it had parmesan cheese, hot sauce and lemon juice on it. My worst memory of living in Texas was waking up one night to go get a drink of water when suddenly; I felt something grab my leg from underneath my bed. I have no idea what that was about, but I was terrified of monsters living under my bed for years after.

In 2001 when I was five, my dad’s job moved us to Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. We had to say goodbye to our dogs again. We could not take our dogs to Hawaii with us because the military housing in Hawaii would not allow Pitbulls. They would have had to wait six months in a kennel (quarantine) waiting for clearance, and we did not want to do that to them. We gave them to a guy who owned a ranch where they could roam free; he was a boxing trainer for Johnny Tapia. I attended Kindergarten at Solomen Elementary school on Schofield Barracks and my teachers name was Ms. Sanamura.

In 2002, I started 1st grade and continued on in the same school. I played soccer on a team called the “Griffins” and I got three new pets; a rabbit named "Peter" and two chameleons that had no names. I started 2nd grade in Hawaii but moved shortly after. My favorite memory of living in Hawaii was eating at Luau's and my worst memories were either getting bit by a brown recluse spider or getting stung by a Manohar Jellyfish in the ocean.

In 2003, My dad received new orders to become a recruiter which moved us from Hawaii to New Mexico. I was seven years old, when my brother and I moved to our grandmother’s house in San Mateo, New Mexico while my parents found us a place to live. I attended 2nd grade at Milan Middle School in Milan, New Mexico. Every morning my brother and I would take the bus from our grandmother’s house to school, 23 miles away. My bus driver at the time was my aunty. My favorite memory of living with my grandmother was getting to see my cousins, Auntie's, Great Grandparent’s, and Grandmother. My worst memory was when I was horseplaying with my cousin and my nose got broken.

In 2004 when I was eight years old, my brother and I moved back with our parents to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I started 3rd grade at Cesar Chavez Elementary school which was three blocks away from my house. At the beginning of 3rd grade, I was diagnosed with ADHD and ADD, this is when I started taking medication to help keep me focused. In 2004, my family and I moved again to Rio Rancho, New Mexico when my parents bought our home. During 3rd grade I stopped drinking soda and started drinking milk because I wanted to stay healthy. My favorite memory of living in Santa Fe was my collection of rocks and minerals. My worst memory of living in Santa Fe was my Great Grandparents (Claudio and Maggie Baca) passing away.

In 2005 when I was nine years old, my family and I moved to Queen Creek Arizona. I attended 4th grade at San Tan Heights, Arizona. This is when I picked up skateboarding as an interest. This is also when I started playing one of my favorite games "RuneScape". In 2006, I went to middle school at Skyline Elementary School K-8. As the years went on, skateboarding became more important to me. My favorite memory of living in Arizona was being taught by my teacher Mr. Donahue. I enjoyed his class because he too had ADHD and ADD so he would help me by giving me tips to control my ADHD and he would work one-on-one with me a lot because he knew it was not easy for me to pay attention.

In 2007 when I was 11 years old, my family and I moved to Ewa Beach, Hawaii. My brother stayed in Arizona until he was 18 so he could graduate with my cousin, Eric. I attended 6th grade at Iroquois Point Middle School. Throughout the year, I started to get bullied. I used to be someone who enjoyed being outside but once I started getting bullied, I would just stay inside and play RuneScape. This is where most of my time went during 6th grade. I would wake up and play before I went to school, and I would stay up all night playing. I was also stung by Jellyfish for the second time so after that, I decided I was not really a beach person either.

In 2008 when I was 12, my family and I moved to Fort Shafter, Hawaii. The house we moved into was the biggest house, to this day, I had ever lived in. It was originally a 2-house apartment on one floor but the wall separating them was knocked down and the two apartments were turned into one. I attended 7th grade at Moanalua Middle School and continued playing RuneScape through 7th grade, but I had also started playing Xbox 360. I was very interested in games at the time, and they consumed most of my days. At the time, my favorite game became Guitar Hero, which is what introduced me to my appreciation of rock and metal. On the weekends I began running with my cross-country team in tournaments and around this time is when I started to take an interest in girls. I would spend most of my time in school hanging out and talking with them. While experiencing all the stuff I was doing I had forgotten about school and degraded it in my mind into something that was worthless and unimportant, and I barely passed that year with D's.

In 2009 when I was 13 years old, my family and I moved to Fountain, Colorado. I attended my 8th grade year at Fountain Middle School and unfortunately for me, it wasn’t a good experience. Again, I dealt with being bullied and made fun of throughout my 8th grade year. By the middle of the year, I was diagnosed with depression and was prescribed anti-depressants. Later in the school year I remember being assigned a book report and my mom took me to a bookstore so that I could pick out a book. I chose this book called, "Go Ask Alice Anonymous". While starting to read the book, I noticed that I was quickly gaining a deep interest for it. The book was about a teenage girl in the 1960's that had been served a soft drink laced with LSD in a dangerous party game; from then on, she started to experiment with more drugs, alcohol and sex which led her through a life of never-ending obstacles. This book made a big impact on my life and led me to be curious about drugs, alcohol, and myself.

By the end of the 8th grade year, I was so curious about this stuff that I decided that I wanted to try marijuana. One Friday, I had marijuana in my backpack at school. I had made it all the way to 6th period without getting caught. By 6th period, which was P.E., we were doing sprints. I made it through class, sweating and extremely exhausted but filled with relief. I thought "Hey, I made it through the day and did not get caught with drugs". I was sadly mistaken. As I walked to my backpack in preparation of going home on the bus, three teachers came up to me and asked me to walk to the office with them. At that moment I had known exactly what was happening, I was in disbelief. I thought "I just received drugs for the first time in my entire life and within hours I had gotten caught. It was one of the most depressing moments in my life! Once in the office, the principal had called my mom to inform her of the current situation I was caught in. It was at that moment I found out she was at the airport picking up my dad from his one-year deployment in Afghanistan.

After my principal got off the phone with my mom, she led me to a cop who intensely interrogated me. After the interrogation my brother’s girlfriend, Priscilla was called and told to come pick me up from school. There, I waited until my parents came home to face the consequences. Two days later was my birthday and I had received a bunch of gifts over the weekend but as soon as we got home, my parents took them all away. One week later I had to go to an expulsion hearing at school where I was asked to make a statement that described the actions leading me to have possession of the marijuana. After the hearing, the school's administration decided they were going to suspend me for the next three weeks of school, which was up until summer. Needless to say, the next three weeks I was grounded.

A month later I had my first court date, I went to court and received a $100 fine with 16 hours of community service and was also enrolled into summer school. I would go to summer school for four hours then walk a half hour away and do my community service for two hours. Within two weeks I had the community service done. One day while still in summer school we had a substitute teacher that just so happened to be the P.E. coach that reported me to the office. The whole day in class I was terrified that something might be brought back up from my past, but it turned out to be just a normal day.

I started 9th grade at my new high school, Fountain Fort Carson High School. When I started there, I thought it was the most work I had ever been assigned in my life. I began to fall behind in all my classes and singled myself out as a "loner". Soon I started to get physically bullied and sometimes I would get bullied all day in every class. My mood along with my grades began to fall drastically. My mom said that if I joined sports, I would make a lot more friends and people would not mess with me as much. So, I did. I tried out for the soccer team and made “C” Squad. I thought this would help me with my social problems I had been having at the time, but it didn't. Joining the soccer team only made things worse for me; every player on my team would always talk me down because I had long hair. I didn't really understand because I was a really good player, but nobody seemed to care about that. All they wanted to do was make fun of me. From that point I thought that I couldn't deal with being in school with other people, I just wanted to be alone. One day I was so depressed I didn't really care about anything I said or had done. I had walked up to someone, using inappropriate language towards a teacher that would later get me removed. I didn't know what to do so I sat there anxiously as the Dean called my mom. I had no clue what was about to happen next. The Dean got off the phone with my mom and began to explain the consequence of my actions. Again, I received an expulsion hearing. This time they looked at my behavior and my grades and saw that I was not passing any of my classes. This led to me being expelled from the high school and forced to go to their secondary school, "Lorraine Secondary School". The school was on the right side of Lorraine which was called Second Chance. When I started at Lorraine Secondary School, I was put on an online credit recovery program called "Apex". I stayed on Apex for one “Hexter” and then I was assigned regular classes, but I still had one or two apex classes on the side. This to me, is very similar to discovery's way of teaching. At this school I continued to struggle and was failing every class I was enrolled in. A few months later, that principal decided to move me from Lorraine Secondary school and place me in Second Chance Secondary School. For the rest of the year, I went to Second Chance and did almost nothing. My whole freshman year, I received one- and one-half credits when I was supposed to have six and one fourth credits. I was sent by my district to mandatory summer school where the school assigned me to work on another Apex credit recovery program. I was happy that I was assigned to something I was familiar with and ended up passing summer school within three weeks.

My 10th grade year, I was transferred back to Lorraine Secondary School. That year I was determined to catch back up with my classes by working extremely hard in school. Through the whole year I managed to keep semi-good grades, especially in my geometry class. Almost every Hexter I would get 115% and throughout the year I changed my lifestyle. This brought me to here, 11th grade at Discovery High School.

As I continued to push through, I just kept going through the motions. We ended up moving to Woodland Park and the distance was even further. Good thing that I was given the opportunity to work through Apex again with Fountain Fort Carson High School. School was still not of any interest to me, well not being present in any classroom I should say. I felt as if I could learn more online and of course I wouldn’t have all of the in-school obstacles that I personally did not want to deal with. I felt as if there was more to life than dealing with other people’s issues, plus I had already started working within the same organization as my mom. I got a federal job within the Department of Defense doing maintenance and did this along with my Apex courses in the evening. I liked this job a lot as I was learning different things, making good money and had a good co-worker that has now become a good friend. We would even go to the gym sometimes and challenged ourselves to do the Spartan Race, which we did complete. In March of 2016, I was given my first Department of the Army Certificate of Appreciation for support during inclement weather. It made me feel proud to receive such an award.

Managing both school and work was tough and began to be hard for me to balance. I just wanted school to be done. I would say my biggest accomplishment online was teaching myself pre-Cal over the previous summer. I passed this course with a B+, although I was holding an A- for quite some time. Not bad, I would say for not being in a classroom setting. Sometimes it would be hard to stay on task, but my mom was always getting after me to finish my courses as graduation was approaching. I still remember dragging this out until the very last moment, and even then, it was so hard to focus or even want to care. I got up and told my mom that I was going to head down the mountain to hang out with my friends, but she insisted I stay home and complete my test. She reminded me that time was running out and this was the last night Mr. Rosenthough would be standing by to unlock test after test so that I could keep going until I achieved the needed credits. So, I sat back down and went at it for the next three hours and finished with only minutes to spare. Mr. Rosenthough emailed me and said, "Autry you made it! You will be attending the graduation ceremony!" I read the email to my mom, and she immediately hugged me, and said "I knew you could do it!" Graduation was May 26, 2016, and I was like, finally, it’s over!

I could now focus on what was next now that I was transitioning jobs after making it one year in the position at Fort Carson. I would be moving up to a position at Woodland Park, but life would start spiraling for me again.

____________________________________________________________________________

Autry faced many challenges in life and because of those challenges, he lost several precious years. Due to violations, he incurred form the effects of his addiction, he was in and out of the system. Autry was strong, he never stopped fighting. He consistently held jobs and finally enrolled in college seeking out an associate degree in automotive. Autry was at his peak and proud; he was out setting a goal, saving money and proudly purchased his black BMW. His life was on a path towards his accomplishments, and everything was going well until life had him spiraling again. He was in a car accident, but the thing about Autry is, he never gave up.

Moving to Arizona, he fought for his sobriety and was on a road to success. He admitted himself into treatment, attended sobriety sessions and even volunteered one day to stand up and tell his story. I still remember that day. I remember how he looked and how he felt. He said, "there are so many others that are so much older than me and here I am, 26, and I can almost say I have done just about everything that they have, if not more. I probably shouldn’t be here today. If I stand up, what will they think of me?" Well, he stood up and he said, “not only did people cry mom, but everyone hugged me. Normally, people don’t go and hug everyone. Why do you think they did that for me?" I said, that’s because their heart went out to you Autry and they felt you. Autry has always had a big heart and everyone around him could feel that. He was incredibly sincere and unapologetically real. He enjoyed being an uncle and truly loved his nephews and nieces. He was a thinker, very smart and loved working out. He was so strong! My baby boy was 191 pounds! Autry was a hard worker and although his heart for Colorado remained, his last days were in Arizona with family. He was employed as a supervisor for a landscaping company where he earned respect and made friendship from not just his co-workers but also his superiors. The respect and the friendships were strongly represented by the large attendance at Autry’s funeral.

Autry faced bullying at a young age as he explained earlier. Bullying is real and should never be tolerated. Addiction is a disease, and it is real. “EVERYONE MATTERS” and everyone should know that help is out there. The trauma from both of those evils can be incredibly damaging and traumatizing causing someone to hold emotions in out of fear. What everyone needs to understand is that we are all in this world for a purpose and while that purpose may not make sense to everyone, that’s ok. Everyone has their own path to travel and unfortunately, not all will find their way. This is why we should also be accepting, loving to one another and when the opportunity presents itself, lend a hand.

I believe Autry knew his path but because he endured more pain than anyone ever should, he lost sight of which direction he was meant to travel. Life was that challenging for him. Through all the difficulties my son had to endure, the pain from holding in his sadness led him to his addiction. I have seen Autry at his worst and at his best, and I have loved him in each of those moments, never holding one higher than the other and only holding him every single time. He did have so many happy moments in life. He had lived and traveled to several places in his life; including Arizona, California, Hawaii, Korea, Louisiana, Mexico, New Mexico, Washington, and Texas. He experienced true love and had a long relationship lasting over six years. Autry loved his family; he loved his friends, and he loved meeting just about anyone and learning about them. He was a person who loved being around nature and he loved just about any animal there was or that he encountered. He was intrigued with anything that held life. I would say that is because that was his purpose… LOVE. He was such a beautiful person and an even more beautiful soul. Autry Flores left his mark here on earth and touched so many more than we could truly ever know, but I know just in Colorado alone, many met our Angel. Our son left us way too early, and only God knows why he had to go, but there are no scars in Heaven. Our son is an Angel.