'I can’t picture my life without him': Round Rock mom laments son Victor Soto's death

ROUND ROCK — The last time Gisela Rodriguez saw her son he was laughing. Tobias "Victor" Soto, 14, had surprised her when she came home from work on July 31 by hiding in a hallway and then jumping out before she reached their Round Rock apartment door, Rodriguez said.

"Then I started laughing, and he walked off with his skateboard," said Rodriguez. "I didn't ask him where he was going. I really trusted him, and I figured he was going out real quick and would come back. He never left for too long."

Rodriguez said that after Victor left, she tried to take a nap but got two calls from a friend of his who said her son was supposed to meet him but had never arrived.

"We thought he was hiding until I got the news that he passed," Rodriguez said.

Victor was hit and killed by the driver of a stolen car on July 31 as the teen was crossing the street at the intersection of La Frontera and Louis Henna boulevards, police have said. The driver of the stolen vehicle,Leandro Brito-Martinez, has been charged with murder.

An officer was chasing Brito-Martinez, 26, but had given up the pursuit shortly before Brito-Martinez hit another car and then hit Victor, police have said.

More:Driver fleeing Round Rock police killed 14-year-old pedestrian, officials say

Rodriguez said that after she got the call from Victor's friend on July 31, she looked up whereVictor's cellphone was and drove to the area.

"It never crossed my mind that Victor was hurt. I thought he had dropped his phone and was somewhere else," she said. "I saw a car wreck, and I thought, 'This is weird. What has it got to do with Victor?'"

A short time later, she asked a police officer if he had seen a kid with a skateboard. "He said, 'do you know him?' and I said, 'That's my son,' and then he asked me to park," she said. An investigator later showed her a picture of her son and one of his skateboard, and asked her to verify his identity, she said, but he said nothing else.

"I was kind of hysterical asking what hospital he was at," she said.

She said her father found out a short time later that Victor's body was at the scene. "I insisted on seeing him," Rodriguez said.

"When they took me to see him, he was all the way by a hotel," she said. "They had him on a stretcher but I didn't understand why he was at such a distance from the intersection. He must have been hit at a very fast speed." She said she hugged her son's body through the blanket that was covering him.

Victor was "propelled" 300 feet when Brito-Martinez hit him in the stolen car, according to an arrest affidavit.

"I'm just broken," said Rodriguez. "This changed my whole life, and we will never be the same. My son was taken from me, and his death was horrific. His life was cut short ... all over a stolen vehicle. It was a cold-hearted crime."

"I can’t picture my life without him," his mother said. "He was my best friend. Me and my two kids were together all of the time. We would go the gym and work out together and come back to the house and watch TV and listen to music."

Victor and his 16-year-old sister, Cristina, were very close, said Rodriguez, a single mother who works as a hairstylist. "He was like her shadow; they were always together," she said.

"He was very loving and always looking out for me and his sister. He would cook for us and liked making macaroni and cheese and enchiladas," she said.

Rodriguez said they had all just moved to a new apartment, and Victor was happy because he had his own room for the first time.

"He was quiet and very strong," she said. "He hung up every curtain in the house, and I bought furniture and he put it together. I told him, 'Victor you are more of a man than any man I ever met. You put together the whole house without me asking you to.'''

Rodriguez said her son was going to be a freshman at Round Rock High School where he wanted to play football.

This summer he had gone to a football camp for Round Rock High School, but he also loved boxing and was taking boxing lessons, said Rodriguez.

He was a good student, she said. "He watched my dad go to school and get a Ph.D. in linguistics," she said. "Victor would tell me, 'Mom, what do I have to do to be smarter than grandpa?' At first he had wanted to be a doctor but later he talked about wanting to run businesses, she said.

Victor read every single book on the school list at Bluebonnet Elementary, kept up his grades at Chisholm Middle School and also loved to play chess, his mother said. He wanted to be called by his middle name because she had told him as a child that "Victor" meant victory, she said.

This Christmas, she and Victor were planning to visit New York City because he had fallen in love with the town during a previous visit to hear his sister play violin at Carnegie Hall, Rodriguez said.

"He was such an ambitious kid and never gave me problems," his mother said. "I couldn't be more proud of the life he had in those 14 years."