HispanicBusiness

neighborhood security guard.

He spends time with his girlfriend but says he stopped hanging out with a circle of friends who got into arguments at nightclubs.

"I'm always alone now. That way I don't have any problems with anybody." He said this matter-of-factly, without apparent regret.

On a recent Saturday, Lopez brought a reporter along as he drove his normal route.

He pointed out the spot near Harvard Avenue and Merton Street where robbers shot and killed his uncles Candelario and Marcelino in July 2005. The robbers also shot Augustin's father.

His father's name sounds like his, though it's spelled differently - Agustin.

Emergency workers brought the wounded man to the Regional Medical Center at Memphis, where he lay unconscious for days.

He had taken seven bullets, and the outlook was bleak. His wife, Patricia Lopez, now 45, said she was told that if he lived, he might remain in a vegetative state. Speaking in Spanish, she recalled talking with her husband while he lay in intensive care.

"If you can hear me in your unconsciousness, ask God to heal you. Ask God to heal you because we need you. You have six children who need you."

Days passed. She says that one day she was praying at his bedside when she had a vision: a light that approached from afar and bathed her in its brightness. "I felt that I was in the middle of this light."

From that day on, her husband began to recover and soon left the hospital, she said. She took it as a miracle. He eventually went back to construction work.

Back in the truck, the younger Augustin Lopez points out houses where relatives live.

The neighborhood is full of his aunts, uncles and cousins, many of whom hail from Durango state in Mexico.

The scorpion is a symbol of the state, and one of Augustin's uncles used silver wire to make a model of one of the creatures. It hangs from the truck's rearview mirror.

Though surrounded by relatives, Augustin had few people who could help him pursue an education.

His mother said her education ended in the fifth grade and that her husband didn't go much further. They speak limited English. Augustin said none of his relatives went to college.

"Everything that had to do with school and college, everything from high school and up, I just did on my own," Augustin said.

Augustin says he had trouble at Kingsbury Middle School.

"I guess I stopped caring for a while and started hanging out with the wrong people who didn't care about school," he said.

He failed eighth grade, and the shooting came the following summer.

"I couldn't believe that something like that could happen. Not to our family."

When he repeated the eighth grade at Memphis Catholic, the school referred him to a counselor. "Actually, Memphis Catholic did try to help me out a lot. But since I was just a little upset, I just didn't care."

He went on to Central High School and said teachers treated him well. He took carpentry and loved it.

He had begun helping his father with drywall work on construction sites when he was a child, and says he liked the idea of becoming an architect, someone who would shape the project rather than labor at the bottom. "I just wanted to be someone more on top."

A counselor at Central gave him information about scholarships.