Air Force cadet candidate allegedly slain by illegal immigrant honored with full military funeral
Ava Moore, 18, was set to begin cadet training at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in a few weeks, but was tragically killed while kayaking on Lake Grapevine in Texas over Memorial Day weekend.
Moore was laid to rest with full military honors, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Illegal Aliens Arrested In Death Of Air Force Cadet Candidate Had Suitcases Packed: Report
Full military funeral honors are bestowed upon those who die while on active duty, among others, according to the military's official website. Air Force Academy cadets are considered to be active-duty military members.
Full military funeral honors consist of a minimum of a two-person military service detail who provide three core elements: playing Taps, the folding of the flag, and the flag presentation to family members of the deceased.
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"We lost an exemplary teammate this weekend – Cadet Candidate Ava Moore, whose passion for leadership and service left an impact on everyone she met," said Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind, U.S. Air Force Academy Superintendent after Moore's death.
"Ava's constant happiness and attitude helped her squadron get through the challenges of the Prep School, and her drive to excel was on display as she sought out leadership positions to improve herself and her team," he said. "Our team is focused on providing support to Ava's family, her Prep School Squadron, the Prep School Women's Basketball team, and the entire Academy family."
Law Enforcement Reps 'Disgusted' After Illegal Alien Allegedly Kills Air Force Recruit: 'There Will Be Others'
Moore graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School on May 19, 2025. She was set to become a part of the USAFA Class of 2029.
Moore was hit by a jet ski while kayaking on the lake over Memorial Day weekend.
The suspected driver of the jet ski and a man who allegedly helped her flee, both illegal immigrants from Venezuela, were arrested in Dallas last Tuesday. The pair reportedly had suitcases packed when they were captured by authorities.
Daikerlyn Alejandraa Gonzalez-Gonzalez, 22, was charged with second-degree manslaughter, a felony.
Maikel Coello Perozo, 21, is accused of picking her up and driving away from the scene. Authorities allege Perozo hit another vehicle while speeding off. He has been charged with a collision involving damage to a vehicle and hindering apprehension, both misdemeanors.
Gonzalez-Gonzalez remains in the Tarrant County Jail on a $500,000 bond as of Tuesday. Perozo remains in the jail on a $3,250 bail.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has placed detainers on both of them, meaning that when their criminal proceedings and punishments have concluded in the United States, they will be deported.Original article source: Air Force cadet candidate allegedly slain by illegal immigrant honored with full military funeral
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Time Magazine
7 hours ago
- Time Magazine
The Unspoken Etiquette of Mourning on Social Media
When Molly Levine, 28, lost her father in the summer of 2023, 'life stopped.' Just weeks earlier, she had been dating, posting comedic TikToks, and balancing a high-stress product job at Google with sweaty nights out in New York. Now, she could barely get out of bed. She took leave from work and holed up with her family, surviving on chunks of chocolate babka she'd eat late at night, when everyone had cleared out of the family kitchen. Reading about death, finding meaning in memories, and searching for signs from the other side consumed her days. But another, more frivolous concern gnawed at her. 'After you lose someone, you have to immediately decide whether you're going to be one of those people who posts or not,' Levine says. 'And I know people say, 'There's no right way to grieve,' but on social media—it almost feels like there is.' What do you share? When do you share it? And is it bad if you don't post at all? These were the questions that tormented Levine in the weeks after her father's death. 'It feels silly,' she says. 'You're like, 'Is this what I'm really thinking about?' But you are.' Grief gone viral Jensen Moore, a journalism professor at The University of Oklahoma, studies how people grieve on social media. '[Millennials and Gen Z] post their breakfast. They post themselves on the toilet. They've done everything,' she says. 'So mourning online is just an extension of living their lives online for everyone to see.' Ten days after her father's passing, Levine crafted a 350-word caption to accompany a photo of her father to post on Instagram. Comments and DMs from her community poured in, offering their memories and condolences. But Levine, a social media savvy young millennial, knew the line between sharing and scaring. 'I really refined my message,' she says. 'I was very cognizant of how uncomfortable I could make other people.' As social media reshapes how we share—and grieve—there are many for whom public mourning still feels gauche, even offensive. Vogue editor Chloe Malle notably loathes mourning-by-emoji. 'An Instagram feed is just too public a platform for meaningful mourning,' she wrote in her 2014 essay, 'Why We Should Give Up Public Mourning on Social Media.' Yet, others are crucified for not posting quickly enough—like when 90210 fans attacked Jenny Garth for her silence after Luke Perry's death, or when the internet turned on the Friends cast for waiting days to acknowledge Matthew Perry's passing. In one of her studies, Moore examined how people self-police online grief. 'It used to be, you would never post a picture of someone grieving or a photo of the deceased,' Moore says. 'This generation is posting TikToks of themselves crying.' In 2013, the millennial 'funeral selfie' trend broke the internet, triggering a flood of commentary about the generation's perceived apathy and vanity. Over a decade later and the conversation still hasn't moved beyond moral panic. 'Do I have a photo with them? It's the first thing you think of when someone dies,' says Jay Bulger, a 43-year-old filmmaker from D.C. 'It's a mad scramble to post.' When Kobe Bryant died tragically in 2020, social media became one giant memorial. But mourners were criticized. 'Why are you sobbing online about a basketball player you didn't know?' Moore recalls the pushback. Public grief often reads as strategic—an invitation for sympathy, likes, or cultural proximity. Some call this new wave of mourning content 'performative grief,' says Moore. 'Because those likes can potentially earn you more followers, or in some cases, money.' But for those genuinely trying to express their loss, the online landscape can feel like a minefield: sincere grief is often met with suspicion, judgment, or the assumption that it's all for show. 'I have friends who've been very vocal with their grief, and people didn't know how to handle it,' Levine says. She recalls a conversation with friends, criticizing someone's post for being too raw, too unfiltered. 'People just don't know what to do with grief. We don't know how to talk about it without freaking people out.' Read More: When the Group Chat Replaces the Group There are practical reasons for grieving online, says Pelham Carter, a psychology professor at Birmingham City University. It spreads the word. It offers catharsis and connection. Engaging with a deceased person's profile can help sustain a bond beyond the grave. But every post, photo, or story risks transgressing invisible social landmines of what is and isn't acceptable. 'There are these very nuanced rules that are hard to navigate, because they are unwritten,' Carter explains. 'But you get a feeling for when there's been a breach in etiquette.' For Jack Irv, a 30-year-old actor who grew up in New York City, the entire production of grieving on social media 'feels exhibitionist.' In his early 20s, he was part of the city's graffiti scene, climbing up scaffoldings to spray paint with some of the city's best artists. But 'graffiti writers die all the time,' he says. It was the first time he saw his network mourning publicly. 'You get forced into action,' Irv explains. 'It's like proving who is closer. There's a competitive aspect.' Social media can breed competition and comparison, which extends to online grief, says Moore. 'Who's grieving better, who wrote the best eulogy, who posted the best photo, who was closest,' she says. Irv resents the tone of these posts—'It's like a long rambling story about the time they spilled making pasta together.' It feels cheap, he says, that intimacy gets flattened into a caption. Irv recalls in one instance, an acquaintance who was not especially close to the deceased, became the loudest mourner online. 'It made us all feel strange,' he says. Navigating grief's social hierarchy online can be fraught, Carter says. Posting too soon or too often can give the impression you were closer to the deceased than others believe you were. 'It's bumping yourself higher up in the hierarchy than people feel you should be,' says Carter. 'But it's very hard for us, especially in the throes of grief, to acknowledge that there are different forms of closeness.' Who gets to mourn online? In a 2022 study, Carter and co-author Rachel King found a striking disconnect: participants saw their own grief posts as genuine—but assumed others were just seeking attention. Most cited a 'genuine outpouring of grief' as their reason for posting. Yet they believed others were abusing the process. 'There was a hypocritical side,' Carter says. 'People assumed their grief was sincere—but others' were performative.' In 2019, Jennifer, 30, who asked that TIME not include her real name because of the sensitivity of the circumstance, lost a close friend to suicide. The loss sent shockwaves through her tightknit friend group. 'Privately, there were vulnerable conversations between friends where the grief felt real,' she recalls. 'But online, something shifted.' On Instagram, she says, the mourning felt curated. 'It felt more like perception management than actual grief.' In the weeks after her friend's death, unspoken rules emerged. 'The etiquette was: those closest to the deceased had the right to post, and their posts should be engaged with. If you weren't in the inner circle, the rule was: don't post,' she says. These rules were administered via cold shoulders and whispers. Digital anthropologist Crystal Abidin interviewed young people experiencing the first death of a friend to explore a core question: who gets to grieve, how, and why? She found the tension had less to do with competition between mourners and more to do with how grief was received by the inner circle. The young women in Abidin's study outlined unwritten rules: who gets to grieve first, who gets to grieve more, and what must stay private. Breaches often came down to timing—like posting before a partner or family member. On Facebook memorial pages, they didn't want the first post coming from a random friend. 'There's weight given to your tie to the deceased,' Abidin says. As consumers of the internet, 'we're savvy,' says linguist Korina Giaxoglou, author of A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning. 'Even at our most sincere, we still want our posts to reach and engage—that's what posting is.' But that doesn't make us hypocrites, she adds. 'You can want attention and still be fully present in your grief.' Read More: When TikTok Trends Send Kids to the Emergency Room In Western culture, open grief is often frowned upon, Giaxoglou says. There is an understanding that 'during the bereavement period you shouldn't seek attention.' But in other cultures, grief is communal. In the Asia Pacific region, where Abidin conducts much of her research, grieving loudly and publicly is 'how you show that you're a part of that community.' She says, 'It's not uncommon in some funerals to hire mourners whose jobs are to cry, because the louder the cries, the more it shows how loved this person was.' As younger generations move grief from bedrooms and chatrooms to public profiles, conversations around death are returning to the public square. 'As a community, we need to see these expressions in order to recover,' Giaxoglou says. 'Otherwise, it's like we're hiding our emotions.' A year later, Levine has developed a dark humor about grieving online. 'In some ways, if you don't post about your grief, it's like—did you even care?' she says with a smile. She remembers staring at her Instagram grid, wondering how to follow up a memorial post of her father: 'What's my re-entry going to be? I don't want to signal that I'm over it. I'll be grieving forever.' Years later, Levine is once again making funny videos on TikTok. 'I look back now, and wonder what changed where I was like, 'Okay, now I can post a sunset again.''

2 days ago
A Mississippi monkey sanctuary helps veterans with PTSD find peace
PERKINSTON, Miss. -- In the embrace of a cheerfully chittering spider monkey named Louie, an Army veteran who grappled for decades with post-traumatic stress disorder says he finally feels at peace. 'Being out here has brought a lot of faith back to me,' said John Richard. 'There's no feeling like it.' The bond began last fall when Richard was helping two married veterans set up the Gulf Coast Primate Sanctuary, volunteering his time to build the enclosure that's now Louie's home in rural southeast Mississippi. During a recent visit, Louie quickly scampered up Richard's body, wrapping his arms and tail around him in a sort of hug. Richard, in turn, placed his hand on the primate's back and whispered sweetly until Louie disentangled himself and swung away. 'He's making his little sounds in my ear, and you know, he's always telling you, 'Oh, I love you,'' Richard said. ''I know you're OK. I know you're not going to hurt me.'' Richard said his connection with Louie helped more than any other PTSD treatment he received since being diagnosed more than 20 years ago. It's a similar story for the sanctuary's founder, April Stewart, an Air Force veteran who said she developed PTSD as a result of military sexual trauma. 'It was destroying my life. It was like a cancer,' she said. 'It was a trauma that was never properly healed.' Stewart's love of animals was a way to cope. She didn't necessarily set out to create a place of healing for veterans with PTSD, but that's what the sanctuary has become for some volunteers. 'By helping the primates learning to trust, we're also reteaching ourselves how to trust, and we're giving ourselves grace with people,' she said. Her 15-acre property, nestled amid woods and farmland, is filled with rescue dogs, two rather noisy geese and a black cat. It's also now home to three spider monkeys, two squirrel monkeys and two kinkajous, a tropical mammal that is closely related to raccoons. The sanctuary in the town of Perkinston, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) due north of the Gulf coast, includes three large enclosures for the different species. Each has a smaller, air-conditioned area and a large fenced-in outdoor zone, where the primates swing from platforms and lounge in the sun. Checking on the animals — changing their blankets, bringing food and water — is one of the first and last things Stewart does each day. However, she can't do it alone. She relies on a group of volunteers for help, including several other veterans, and hopes to open the sanctuary to the public next summer for guided educational tours. Stewart and her husband, also a veteran, decided to open the sanctuary in October after first rescuing and rehoming monkeys. With the help of two exotic-animal veterinarians, they formed a foundation that governs the sanctuary — which she said is the only primate sanctuary in Mississippi licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — and ensures the animals will be cared for even when the Stewarts are no longer able to run it themselves. All the animals were once somebody's pet, but their owners eventually couldn't take care of them. Stewart stressed that primates do not make good or easy pets. They need lots of space and socialization, which is often difficult for families to provide. The sanctuary's goal is to provide as natural a habitat as possible for the animals, Stewart said, and bring them together with their own species. 'This is their family,' she said.


Atlantic
2 days ago
- Atlantic
Trump's Rule for National Parks: Only Mention the Good American History
Don't worry. Although content that INAPPROPRIATELY DISPARAGES AMERICANS PAST OR LIVING or that includes MATTERS UNRELATED TO THE BEAUTY, ABUNDANCE, AND GRANDEUR OF THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE has been targeted for removal at national-park sites, the caliber of park tours has not suffered! Here is a glimpse of the kind of information you can look forward to receiving at each of these historic sites. Stonewall National Monument: One of the best places to admire the abundant natural beauty of New York City. The taxis, yellow. The skyscrapers, high! The luminous walk signs, with their flashing white gentleman composed of tiny stars, majestic! Here a community rose up in response to a police raid and sparked a revolution. We cannot say which community, but we hope there weren't any LGBTQ people present. It seems unlikely; they did not exist before 1967, which was one of many things that made America Great at that time, and which we are trying our best to replicate today. We've been removing the movement's patrons from the Stonewall website one letter at a time and seeing if anyone notices. Manzanar National Historic Site: This well-preserved internment-camp site from World War II is a chilling, gut-wrenching reminder of the stunning natural beauty of our flawless nation! Mount Rushmore National Memorial: This incomplete statue of some presidents will be a wonderful place to contemplate America's beauty soon, when it is beautified even further by the addition of the best president yet! We don't need to say anything more about this site. Nice, uncontroversial place for some sculptures of white men, we're pretty sure! Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site: The National Guard liked this high school so much that it decided to sit in on classes here for a time in the 1960s. For some reason, only nine of the students who went here are singled out as heroes, but we think, actually, every student is a hero. Redwood National and State Parks: These beautiful, large trees are big enough to fend for themselves, and the implication that action is needed on our part to protect them is, frankly, insulting. Trees eat carbon dioxide, you know!!! Adams National Historic Park: President John Adams presided over the passage of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798! A great thing. Good legacy. Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail: Some really scenic sights along here. Great place to hear birds. John Lewis marched across a bridge on this route, and some police marched out to meet him. Fun! Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site: This site was set aside to commemorate a bunch of people who have been removed from Air Force training materials, so we are unsure what they did. As soon as these people are added back to the training materials, we can tell you! Just keep in mind that if it appears that any of the people who participated in United States history weren't white, that is DEI. Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park: This woman is famous for some reason, but we can't say for sure what that is. Maybe the rare natural splendor of the surroundings of her home. Sometimes she led fellow Americans on long treks on foot, presumably to admire the breathtaking beauty of the environment up close. She did this many times. She must have loved nature! Gettysburg National Military Park: It appears that lots of brave men fought and died here, but for what reason, we can't exactly say. Not for us to take sides! We'll refer you to President Donald Trump's thoughts: 'Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. It was so much and so interesting and so vicious and horrible and so beautiful in so many different ways; it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And, uh, the statement of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor. 'Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.' They were fighting uphill. He said, 'Wow, that was a big mistake.' He lost his great general. And they were fighting. 'Never fight uphill, me boys!' But it was too late.' This is what happened here, and we hope you have no further questions. Women's Rights National Historic Park (Seneca Falls): Here a bunch of women got together and asked for something they did not really need! Most important: There's a waterfall nearby. Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park: Here was born a president who did something that was important to do, and especially at that time. One of the lesser presidents, he came to guide the nation through the Civil War, which was fought over nothing. The Seinfeld of wars. Trail of Tears National Historic Trail: This scenic route takes you through nine states, starting in Georgia and continuing to Oklahoma! Along this path, you can see a lot of foliage. A fun trail to walk voluntarily. Reconstruction Era National Historic Park: Things have always been good in this country. Look—a bird. Wow! Check out all the waterfowl around here! Boston National Historic Park (Freedom Trail): To describe the historic significance of this site would require us to disparage King George III of England. Which we are loath to do! There's no shame in being a king.