Grief still fresh for family of man killed trying to stop shooting spree

It’s been a year since she lost her son, but Debra Wilcox remains disbelieving.

The 52-year-old mother still catches herself thinking he’s going to walk through the door any second.

Joseph Wilcox was 31 when he was gunned down in an east valley Wal-Mart last summer while trying to stop a shooting spree. Like violent characters from a Quentin Tarantino movie, the husband-and-wife shooters already had ambushed and killed two Las Vegas police officers who were eating lunch at a nearby pizzeria. Wilcox, who had a concealed weapons permit and carried a handgun, tried to stop the husband but was shot by the wife. The killers later died during a shootout with police inside the store.

Debra Wilcox met with the Review-Journal last week to reflect on her son’s life and legacy. She’s determined to make sure he isn’t forgotten.

A FAMILY’S TRAUMA

Wilcox never used to worry about family members who stayed out late. Now she panics. She wants to keep her children close because the family has lost too much already, she said.

“I don’t know how anybody else survives it. God bless anybody who’s lost a child,” she said.

Two weeks after her son was killed, Wilcox’s mother died. She said her mother was distraught and wanted to be with her grandson.

“She was just tired,” Wilcox said.

The public attention that followed the tragedy was also hard for the family. Mean-spirited public comments on the Internet often added insult to injury. Joseph’s older brother, Jack Wilcox, 36, said he found at least 15 animated re-enactments of the morning his brother was killed on the Internet.

“They all got it wrong,” he said. “It makes him look like an idiot. You have no idea the nutcases on there.”

The older brother and his wife Angel Wilcox, 33, packed up their home across town after the shooting and moved closer to his mother in the east valley near Lamb Boulevard and Washington Avenue. Family members rely on each other and close friends such as neighbor Betty Harrison for support.

“Every day I wonder where he is, why he’s not coming home. Every day I cry for him,” Debra Wilcox said. “The world keeps moving, but for me, everything stays the same.”

Wilcox wondered if she’ll be able to talk about her son without breaking down.

“All I can say is he’s gone. I still can’t use the other phrase,” she said.

“Whoever you’re thinking about, call them and tell them you love them. If you think it can’t happen to you, it can. I used to believe the streets were safer than they are. Now I don’t. I’m not worried about going out, but I don’t believe it can’t happen to me anymore.”

A QUIET MAN

On the day he died, Joseph Wilcox was on his way to swim at his grandmother’s when he made a quick stop at Wal-Mart to return a modem.

He loved video games and computers. He liked four-wheeling, shooting and watching movies. He loved to tease his little sister.

The family laughed as they recalled the time he convinced her that the world was going to end when the Mayan calendar did.

“I actually cried because of that,” C.J. Foster, 19, said with a little smile.

“He loved to make her nuts,” Debra Wilcox said. “Then he came out the next morning and said, ‘See, I told you the world wasn’t going to end.’ ”

All of his siblings were raised in the Las Vegas Valley. Debra Wilcox came to the area more than 30 years ago and has lived in the same home for about 10 years.

Joseph Wilcox had a colorful way of expressing himself — his family said they could hear him cussing from the other side of the home. But while he sometimes had a temper, he wasn’t violent. He would just storm out and go to Boulder Station for a while, his mother said.

He also had a rough relationship with his father, which might be why he was always quiet and reserved. People in the neighborhood didn’t know him because he kept to himself. Everyone in his small group of friends was quiet, too, but they always had fun together, his mother said.

People knew he carried a firearm, she said, but he was responsible with it.

“In his world, you had no right to threaten someone else,” Debra Wilcox said. “He was pro-Second Amendment, but he wasn’t pro-killing.”

The responsibility of owning a gun weighed heavily on him, too, she said. They often talked about the mass gun-violence tragedies in the news. He said that if a handful of people had been brave enough to step up, a lot of lives could have been saved.

“That just disturbed him,” his mother said. He didn’t seek the limelight, she said. He liked his quiet life and his anonymity. “He wasn’t going in to be a hero. He didn’t think he was a badass.”

On the morning of June 8, 2014, as he stood near the Wal-Mart check-out registers, Joseph Wilcox saw a man with a gun on a rampage. He tried to help, but he didn’t know there were two active shooters. As he approached the man, crouched near a display rack, the woman shot him from behind.

“Joseph went in the store and never came out,” his mother said.

That day she made a lot of calls and asked a lot of people what was going on.

“But after a while I didn’t have to ask anyone anymore. I knew,” she said. Then someone from the coroner’s officer called her and asked if he could come over.

“As many awards as he received, with all the he’s-a-hero stuff, he’s not here,” she said. “I’ve got a whole bunch of glass and a whole bunch of flags, but I don’t have him.”

A MOTHER’S MESSAGE

Jack Wilcox held up one of his brother’s posthumous honors, an American flag banner signed by people who were in the Wal-Mart. One man thanked his brother for saving his pregnant wife. Such memorials and remembrances are scattered throughout the family’s home.

His belongings are where he left them in his room, but now the space is also filled with flowers, pictures and citations. There were Metro accolades and Las Vegas City Council certificates. There’s not enough space to display them all.

Metro officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo, whom Wilcox said she has always kept in her thoughts and prayers, have been memorialized in the valley, in Carson City and in Washington, D.C. At a Las Vegas Parks Commission meeting Tuesday, City Councilman Steve Ross shared plans to name parks after the officers.

Metro has said a tree at the Northeast Area Command station will be dedicated to Wilcox on the tragedy’s anniversary.

Looking at keepsakes and thinking of her son, Debra Wilcox said she just doesn’t want people to forget him.

“He’s not yesterday’s news to me,” she said.

Contact Wesley Juhl at wjuhl@reviewjournal.com and 702-383-0391. Find him on Twitter: @WesJuhl