King of the Hill voice actor Jonathan Joss’ husband has shared new details about the star’s final moments after he was fatally shot by a neighbor Sunday.
Joss’ husband Tristan Kern de Gonzales told The Independent Tuesday that after shooting Joss, the suspect, who police have identified as Sigfredo Ceja Alvarez, was “laughing” and calling them slurs.
“Everything was really close range. It was in the head,” Kern de Gonzales said. “I held his face together while I told him how much I loved him.”
“He could still hear me, he looked up at me and he wasn’t able to talk because of the extent [of his injuries], but I could tell he was trying to say, ‘I love you,’” he said.
Kern de Gonzales claimed that Alvarez approached the pair while shouting homophobic slurs, and continued to do so after shooting Joss.
“While I’m holding him, he has the gun pointed over me, and he’s laughing, saying, ‘Oh, you love him? Joto,’” Kern de Gonzales alleged.
“‘Joto’ is Spanish for f----t. I never knew the word until I came to Texas, and then I heard it a lot,” he said.
Kern de Gonzales said that the couple would always get homophobic comments thrown at them in their neighborhood—“Jonathan would be harassed for just being in his yard wearing a dress”—with Joss also getting harassed for being Native American.
“He would be playing the drum a lot outside, singing, chanting, praying,” Kern de Gonzales said. “People would drive by and yell out the window, ‘F---ing Indian,’ and it’s just like, what kind of point are you trying to make?”
According to a San Antonio Police Department report, once officers arrived on the scene Alvarez, 59, “immediately” confessed to the murder, telling officers: “I shot him.” He has been charged with first-degree murder.
Despite Kern de Gonzales’ claims that Joss’ death was a result of a homophobic hate crime, the San Antonio Police Department told the Daily Beast in a statement Tuesday that they “found no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Mr. Joss’s murder was related to his sexual orientation.”
“We take such allegations very seriously and have thoroughly reviewed all available information,” they added. “Should any new evidence come to light, we will charge the suspect accordingly.”
Kern de Gonzales disagreed with this assessment, claiming that the police would repeatedly ignored the couple’s complaints of harassment.
“They ignored us, refused to file police reports for about two years, and now they’re trying to say it wasn’t a hate crime,” Kern de Gonzales told The Independent.
“It’s like when the police investigate themselves and find they did nothing wrong,” he added.
Kern de Gonzales said in a Facebook statement Monday that Joss was “murdered by someone who could not stand the sight of two men loving each other.”
“We were harassed regularly by individuals who made it clear they did not accept our relationship,” he said. “Much of the harassment was openly homophobic.”
He said that the shooting occurred when he and Joss went to go check the mail at the site of their former home, which he said was burned down “after over two years of threats from people in the area who repeatedly told us they would set it on fire.”
They found the skull of one of their dogs lying near their mailbox with the “harness placed in clear view,” which caused them both “severe emotional distress.”
“We began yelling and crying in response to the pain of what we saw,” Kern de Gonzales said.
He alleged that’s when Alvarez approached the pair while yelling “violent homophobic slurs” at them before “raising a gun from his lap” and firing.
Ken de Gonzales said Joss pushed him out of the way. “Jonathan saved my life,” he said. “I will carry that forward. I will protect what we built.”
