Mother’s prayers keep son’s memory alive

Every night at 10 p.m., family and friends of Specialist Alex Jimenez gather in his mother’s Corona home to pray the rosary.
Afterward, they read passages from Samuel - books 23 and 27 - and place white roses on a bookcase, entirely devoted to the 25-year-old soldier who went missing in Iraq on May 12. They pray for Jimenez and Private Byron Fouty, who also went missing after an ambush.
As of Thursday, July 12, Jimenez and Fouty will have been gone for two months, and Jimenez’s family tries to remain hopeful.
Jimenez’s mother Maria del Rosario Duran said that like the biblical character, Saul, she searches for someone, who has seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth.
“If you read in the Bible, it is the situation he is in right now,” Duran said.
In the first passage of I Samuel 23, King Saul searches for David, asking his servants, “Find out exactly where David is, as well as where he goes, and who has seen him there. I’ve been told that he’s very tricky. Find out where all his hiding places are and come back when you’re sure. Then I’ll go with you. If he is still in the area, or anywhere among the clans of Judah, I’ll find him.”
She mentioned several instances where journalists and soldiers were released after several months in captivity.
“Maybe it happens the same with Alex and they [will] return him back to me,” Duran said.
When asked how she is coping, Duran said, “You can not imagine. You are asking yourself every day. Where? What happened? Where is he? Who handled him?”
Last month, the two soldiers’ status was changed to missing and captured.
“I don’t want missing. I want captured,” Duran said. “Both are bad. Captured, you don’t know what they are doing to him, and missing, you don’t know where he is,” Duran said.
She said she was visited on Friday, June 29 by a member of the military, telling her of the change in categorization and of the Army’s hope that her son is still alive.
“There is no reason to suggest anything otherwise,” said Ben Abel, a civilian media relations officer from Fort Drum in New York, where Jimenez was based. “The family of course would be notified [if a captured soldier was located] as soon as it was practical.”
When Duran saw a man in uniform at her door, she said her heart sunk. She immediately thought the worst, just as she did when she received a visit after her son went missing.
“When they come here to give me information on May 12, it was terrible,” she said. The second time, she cried tears of joy because her worst fears were not realized.
But she said the waiting is still taking its toll, and each day, she must go about her daily tasks.
“What can I do? I think about my son and his safety, and I think it’s better that the soldiers come back from Iraq. There are a lot of explosions, a lot of soldiers disappear,” she said.
For the Fourth of July, Duran had to go to work but was able to see fireworks at Shea Stadium from her home, a little celebration of the holiday her son loved. She remembered that exactly 24 years earlier she had to take her son to the hospital because he swallowed a penny. Doctors were able to remove the coin without surgery, and she then saw her son’s resiliency.
As a child, he frequently told his mother of his desire to join the armed forces.
“He was always talking about that. I want to go to the Army, ma,” she said.
A photo of Jimenez as a child, clad in a camouflage uniform, sits on Duran’s bookcase - beside that are photos of the soldier in both his dress uniform and fatigues.
On the shelf are statues of Jesus and candles that Duran tries to keep lit constantly for her son.
“Now, we are waiting for news,” she said as she struck a match on Monday, July 9 to relight a flame that had gone out. “We only say, ‘God help my son, protect my son.”