Los Angeles — For four years, Gabriel Trujillo trekked across the United States and south to Mexico in search of a flowering shrub called the common buttonbush.
The plant is native to the diverse climates of Canada, the US, and Mexico. Trujillo, a 31-year-old Ph.D. Students at the University of California, Berkeley wanted to know why it thrived in so many places, and whether the evolution of the species holds potential for future habitat conservation and restoration efforts.
The search ended tragically last week in Mexico, where Trujillo’s father said he was shot seven times. Authorities found her body on June 22 in the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico, days after she was reported missing by her fiancee.
‘wrong place’
Trujillo crossed the Arizona border and entered Nogales on June 17. He spoke to his father the next day, and the next morning he and his fiancée, Roxanne Cruz-de Hoyos, had a conversation. He told her that he was going out to collect plants and would return to his AirBnB later.
Cruz-de Hoyos became concerned when Trujillo didn’t answer her phone calls and text messages — they usually talked several times a day — and her Airbnb hosts said her stuff was still there but she’d returned. did not return She bought a plane ticket the next day and flew to Mexico to search.
On June 22, authorities found her body about 62 miles (100 km) from the Airbnb. Cruz-de Hoyos said, adding that he was still inside his SUV.
She identified him to the Mexican authorities when his father ran to catch a flight from Michigan. The two have released little information about the tragedy and are pleading for answers from the US and Mexican governments.
“Obviously he was in the wrong place,” Anthony Trujillo told The Associated Press on Thursday. As he waited to board a flight back home, he had his son’s body by his side.
The Sonora state prosecutor’s office said in a statement Thursday that it is analyzing evidence “to establish the facts, conditions and cause of death.” The statement did not provide details of what happened or call Trujillo’s death a homicide.
His family begged him not to move to such a dangerous place: Sonora recorded 518 murders during May, according to federal government figures. But Trujillo believed the trip was important to his research.
Sharing a long border with the US, Sonora is a major route for the smuggling of drugs, especially fentanyl, as well as migrants, cash and weapons between the US and the infamous cartel of the same name in the state of Sinaloa and further south.
Sonora has long been important territory for Mexico’s drug cartels and in recent years those rivalries have escalated the level of violence and sometimes left civilian victims.
Cartel gunmen killed three American women and their six children in 2019 near the border between the states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Americans lived in communities established decades earlier by a branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
indigenous roots
For Trujillo, a scholar associated with the indigenous lands of Arizona, Michigan, Illinois, New Mexico, California, and Mexico, the buttonbush’s ability to survive and thrive almost anywhere must have felt familiar.
He spent years studying it and collecting samples, often with Cruz-de Hoyos—a postdoctoral fellow researching widespread tree mortality—in a big red van they bought together.
“We were committed to dedicating our lives to environmental protection and environmental research,” Cruz-de Hoyos told the AP. “We realized that indigenous hands have cared for these lands since time immemorial.”
Attracted to Sonora, Trujillo hoped to connect to his Opata indigenous roots through the group’s ancestral lands in the arid, mountainous region. He eventually wanted to apply his research to creating a garden in Mexico and using buttonbush for wetland restoration. His planned trip included three possible destinations to make a final choice.
With shared ancestry in the Nahua indigenous group, which has ties to the Aztec civilization in central Mexico, the couple resolved to merge their identity and scientific study as part of their future together.
Cruz-de Hoyos had been undergoing fertility treatments for the past two years and this summer trip to Mexico was believed to be Trujillo’s last trip before the couple began trying to conceive.
They had bought a house together, had custom engagement rings made and planned a wedding led by an indigenous elder by the end of the year. They plan to announce their good news in August, when Trujillo returns from his trip.
Cruz-de Hoyos will instead honor Trujillo with a Danza Azteca ceremony, an indigenous spiritual tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area, when her father hosts a Catholic funeral Mass in Michigan next month.
‘Stapler’
Born in Arizona on March 4, 1992, Trujillo’s family moved to Michigan during his childhood. Six children in a blended family in a predominantly white neighborhood: “We were like the Mexican Brady Bunch,” his father said.
Trujillo attended a boarding school in New Mexico in high school and earned a bachelor’s degree from Lake Forest College in Illinois. Fellow of the Ford Foundation, he received his Ph.D. were on their way to completion. at Berkeley in 2025.
“Gabe was a passionate ecologist, field biologist, and advocate for diverse voices in science,” the university’s Department of Integrative Biology wrote in an email to its campus community. “We are all facing a world that is less bright for this loss.”
His mother, Gloria, had died of cancer a decade earlier. Besides his father and Cruz-de Hoyos, Trujillo has five siblings, six nieces and one nephew.
Put him in the same place with the children, said his father, and he will immediately take them out, moving insects and plants here and there. He often took one of his nieces to a pond in Michigan to find frogs. They have named a stuffed frog in his honor.
Anthony Trujillo said, “A 20-minute walk with me would take an hour as he would show me all the plants and mushrooms.” “He wanted to learn everything about everything.”
Despite years of academic achievements, Anthony Trujillo kept thinking about his son’s grade school project: “If you were an object, how would you describe yourself?”
Gabriel Trujillo, only 8 or 9 years old, wrote that he would become a stapler.
“We all wondered, ‘A stapler?’ Now it makes some sense,” her father said, crying. “It holds things together.”
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Sanchez reported from Mexico City.
