Manuel Oliver knew he had to do something different. He was awed by the MFOL kids—they called him Tío (Uncle) Manny, which he asked to be called. He threw his voice behind them, but needed to be more than an echo. He was a successful artist, so he went for something creative.
He began with a mural. He started at an art exhibit in Miami called Parkland 17. It was headlined by Guac’s hero Dwayne Wade. Manny painted a twenty-foot mural on drywall before a live crowd. It featured a stunning likeness of Joaquin’s head and shoulders, six feet high, black and white, with a yellow background and graffiti-style block lettering: we demand change. Then he picked up a sledgehammer. He slammed a huge hole, straight through the drywall, tore it back out and repeated that sixteen more times. “The sound of the hammer . . . boom, it’s like a bullet,” he said. The sound is jarring, the violence is jarring—that was the point. Tío Manny would paint many more walls, and vary the image each time, but seventeen holes would always be struck. Every audience shuddered. And then for every wall, he slid yawning sunflowers into each hole, because the seventeen blasts were horrible, but not the end of the story. Life bloomed again.
He chose sunflowers because the night before the tragedy, Joaquin had asked him to pick up some flowers for his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. Manny’s last image of Joaquin is him holding the sunflowers as he hopped out of the car at school that morning, saying, “I love you, Dad.”
Tío Manny said it back, and added, “Dude, you make sure you call me back.” He wanted to hear Victoria’s reaction. “And he never called back. But I do know that Tori got the sunflowers. So, he had time to give them to Tori.”
Tori split the flowers in half, sealed them in epoxy, and made a necklace each for Patricia and Tío Manny, which they hold dear.
Tío Manny called his murals Walls of Demand. He planned seventeen. They were the first major initiative of Change the Ref, a nonprofit Manny and Patricia created in March “to raise awareness about mass shootings through strategic interventions that will reduce the influence of the NRA on the federal level.”
The name came from a basketball incident in the last days of Guac’s life. Gauc got called for a foul by a ref he felt had a grudge against him. Guac argued and the ref threw him out. He came back to the bench, where his dad was coaching, and asked for help. Manny contested the call and got thrown out, too. Guac thanked him on the ride home. Manny said, Don’t worry about it. That wasn’t just a bad call; it was a weird call. You can’t win with that ref. All you can do is change the ref. That’s what we need to do here, Tío Manny said. So many politicians getting so much money from the NRA. You can’t win if the ref is paid off. Change the ref.
The second wall went up in Los Angeles, a month later, and this time Tío Manny was ready to push it. He wasn’t sure how Patricia would feel about it, or Andrea. Were they really OK with any of this—their son and brother’s face appropriated, six feet high, the face of a political movement? So the day before the L.A. painting, they all sat down and struck “an emotional deal.”
“If any of us is not OK with it, then we stop doing it,” Manny said. “And that included everything. If I need to stop doing walls right now, you just let me know.”
They were on board. Joaquin would be proud. Tío Manny knew that was so. He pointed to a post Joaquin had retweeted in December. It cited the fifth anniversary of Sandy Hook, and it said that if you believe mentally ill people should have access to guns, let alone AR-15s, “then you need to realize the NRA has you brainwashed.” It wasn’t a one-off, Tío Manny said—they were close, and Joaquin was committed. “Sometimes I use this as an example that tweeting and retweeting is not enough,” Tío Manny said. “Me and Patricia are all the way for the rest of our lives and will not only tweet and retweet but also create and find untraditional ways to make statements.”
The next day, Tío Manny went for it. The L.A. mural featured four separate images of