Article: Friend, brother at vigil recall life of woman claimed by domestic violence, urge awareness

It has been more than a year since Stephanie Nunez last heard Amanda Moreno’s squeaky laugh.

“She had a laugh that me and her loved ones ache to hear,” Nunez said.

She described spending an evening with Moreno and friends on June 10, 2010. She suspected Moreno and boyfriend Anthony Torres were in a turbulent relationship. But she never acted on that suspicion, and, a day later, Moreno was dead.

“We didn’t know it would be our last chance,” she said. “I can tell you this much, there are many days I live back in June 2010. If I could have gone back to that morning, I would have tried my hardest to help her.”

Nunez, along with Moreno’s brother, shared stories of their loss and recalled their pain with dozens of people at a candlelight vigil Thursday evening on the Lubbock County Courthouse lawn.

Though they were too late to help the 27-year-old mother of three daughters, Nunez and Joe Moreno said they were hopeful their message of grief and warning

would inspire others in Amanda’s situation to seek help.

Lubbock Women’s Protective Services hosted the candlelight vigil to raise awareness about domestic violence as part of Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October.

While focusing on Moreno, the vigil also memorialized the 141 other Texas women who died in 2010 as a result of domestic violence.

Organizers tied purple tags with each woman’s name to individual white paper bags with electric candle lights lining sidewalks around the courthouse gazebo.

Nunez said she did not want her best friend to become a statistic or a police case number.

“I strongly feel this way about all of the other 141 women whose lives have been taken,” she said.

Nunez and Joe Moreno urged women, their friends, families and others in their lives to be proactive in reporting violence and urging victims to remove themselves from violent relationships.

“If you ever find yourself in a situation like that, then leave,” Joe Moreno said.

He called specifically on men to take a greater role in preventing domestic violence.

“All of this would have been prevented if we would have been aware of the signs of domestic violence,” he said.

Moreno said he was hopeful nobody else would have to endure the violence, pain and heartbreak his sister, her children and her loved ones endured before, during and after her death.

A jury in March convicted Torres, 36, of beating and choking Amanda Moreno to death, robbing her and kidnapping her children. Joe Moreno found his sister’s body on her daughter’s bed on June 13, 2010.

Torres was arrested the same day, when a Lubbock police officer found Torres and Moreno’s 6- and 2-year-old daughters unharmed in Moreno’s vehicle in the Canyon Lakes Park, 2800 Cesar E. Chavez Drive.

His capital murder conviction in 364th District Court came with an automatic sentence of life without the possibility of parole.