MINERAL WELLS — Michael Collins drove into Uvalde on Saturday bearing someone else’s cross. The 15-foot steel symbol of sacrifice, but also of renewed life, was for the 19 elementary children and two teachers gunned down in their classroom on May 24.
“I’ll tell you what,” the Mineral Wells resident said Wednesday. “We go down there to try to ease these people’s pain, and they were in such great spirits. They treated us like royalty.”
Collins, a Weatherford native, wasn’t sure whether God or his son, Michael Dean Collins II, had told him to carry his cross for the city of about 16,100, but it was a familiar voice.
A similar cross he’d made when another son, Brady Collins, died in a 2019 car wreck, has stood at one of Brady’s favorite spots along Indian Creek Road since 2020. Collins placed his son’s ashes in that cross, and the gift to Uvalde bears the names of the late children and their teachers.
A mile-long caravan of supporters, including a cadre of bikers, was welcomed as if they’d brought cool water to the triple-digit day. Living water, perhaps?
“I made friends for life, I really did, with all those people down there,” he said.
A minister from Rio de Janeiro also was visiting the torn community, but he’d evidently been told about the genesis of Collins’ cross ministry.
“And he talked about Brady’s Love,” the father said.
Erecting the symbol was easy, thanks to folks on the ground who’d helped him arrange for a crane, a large drill, concrete.
“It didn’t take 45 minutes to get it in the ground,” Collins said, adding the whole experience was a little overwhelming. “And it effected me pretty bad, I’m not going to lie. I sat in tears most of the day.”
Collins contrasted the scene at 1200 West Main Street, where fellowship found a door into the beaten community, with one a few blocks away.
Protesters, calling for the ouster of the school district’s police chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, were using their loud voices within sight of the mounds of flowers quickly dying at a spontaneous memorial.
“These people were hooting and hollering,” he said. “Then we go down the road, and there was such peace.”
Collins also revealed a surprising tie to the chief.
Another of Collins’ sons works as a liaison to law enforcement for an equipment outlet and had met Arredondo about two weeks earlier and shown his dad the UPD patch the chief had given him.
Collins said he’d run up against city hall bureaucracy in trying to find a place to stand up the cross. Storage, as he was told at one time, “was unacceptable.”
But a mutual friend had lined him up with a woman at Ace Bail Bonds in town, possibly because the business already had a memorial to the tragedy. The Wall of Doves depicts those birds of peace, each with a child or teacher’s name alongside.
“He needed a spot for it,” Brenda Luna said. “He did it, Mr. Collins. It was just him and God, literally him and God — God’s work through him.”
Collins said most of the Mineral Wells brigade stayed in town after the cross was up. But his immediate party, including his son, Michael, and girlfriend, Betty Gonzales, made the five-hour, 335-mile trip home that night.
By midweek, Collins was still under the influence of the Uvalde community and hadn’t really caught up on his sleep.
“I’ve gotten a little bit,” he said. “My minds been going so much.”
Evidently, so. When contacted Wednesday, Collins was at a checkout counter, buying more eight-inch square tubing he’ll work into a memorial for another friend’s loss.
“I’m starting another one,” he said. “I just got the calling.”
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