Build-a-Bear

Every founder of New Mexico Crusaders for Justice carries a bear. Each one is dressed, decorated, or built to hold something of the son or daughter it represents. It’s a way of keeping them close on the days our founders show up in courtrooms, at the Roundhouse, and at vigils to fight for other families.

Tony Bear

Sally’s son, Antonio, was killed in his Albuquerque home on December 16, 2020. He was 32. It took nearly five years, and one mistrial, before a jury finally convicted the two men responsible in October 2025. Sally co-founded New Mexico Crusaders for Justice not long after Antonio died, so that other families waiting for their own answers wouldn’t have to go through it alone.
She carries a bear everywhere she goes. She calls him her emotional support bear, and dresses him in the kind of clothes Antonio would have worn.

“He’s my emotional support bear,” Sally says, “and he goes with me everywhere.”

How Sally Built Tony Bear

Antonio’s voice is in there too. Build-A-Bear stores have a “Record Your Voice” station where a staff member, a Bear Builder, helps you record a message onto a small sound chip before it gets sewn inside. It doesn’t have to be a new recording either. You can hold up a phone and play something that already exists, like an old voicemail, straight into the microphone. That’s how the last message Antonio ever left his mom ended up inside the bear, ready to play back with a press of the paw.

Before one of the trials, Sally brought the bear back to Build-A-Bear for what she calls a special “surgery.” Staff opened him up so she could place a small urn holding some of Antonio’s ashes inside, on his left side, the same side where Antonio was shot.

“I had a little urn, and it had his ashes,” Sally says.

Since then, the bear hasn’t just carried her son’s voice. He carries him.

Sally has said her goal is simple: help even one more family the way she wishes someone could have helped hers.