'Already Living the American Dream'
Gifted Linguist Perez Honored as Academic, Athletic Standout

By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Four days after Daniel Perez Cueva was killed last week, one of his former teachers stood at lunch, at Woodbridge's Hylton High School, and noticed that the name of the young man she'd been mourning all week was right in front of her, in letters across the back of a student's swim team T-shirt.

Without thinking, Ginette Cain reached out and brushed her fingers along Perez's name.

"I was just kind of drawn to it," she said, remembering only after it was too late that teachers are not supposed to touch students.

But the boy in the T-shirt understood. "He knew exactly what I was doing," Cain said. "He turned around and said, 'My sister swam with him.' "

Perez was memorialized last night at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church in Woodbridge, one of the many services and burials being held this week for the 32 students and professors shot to death eight days ago at Virginia Tech. The funeral for Reema Samaha, 18, of Chantilly was also last night.

Perez was something of a wunderkind at Hylton -- a student who spoke English as a second language yet enrolled in some of the toughest classes at school. A student who didn't disappear into the often-quiet and underinvolved ESOL crowd.

"Many times we have trouble getting ESOL students to participate in extra-curricular activities," said Cain, chair of Hylton's English for Speakers of Other Languages department.

But not Perez, who joined the tennis, cross-country and swim teams -- and swam so well that he went to regionals.

Academically, his gift seemed to be in languages, and from the beginning Cain had counseled Perez: "Go with your fastball -- your fastball being languages."

At the time of his death, the 21-year-old spoke Spanish, English, French and Italian and was applying for jobs at the French and Italian embassies. It was in French class that he was killed.

Perez moved to the United States with his mother, Betty Cueva, when he was a freshman in high school. She speaks very little English and works as a maid, Cain said. But she was a teacher in Peru, and she came to the United States with the hope that her son would earn a college degree.

"That provided his motivation," Cain said. "He was doing this for his mother."

At Woodbridge Senior High School, in Perez's sophomore year, he took junior-level U.S. history, said his guidance counselor, Barbara Dragos. When he transferred to Hylton in his junior year, one of his electives was 20th-century history. For his senior year, he followed a "very rigorous form of study," as Cain put it, taking honors-level English, state and federal government and world geography classes.

After graduating from Hylton with an advanced studies diploma, Perez enrolled for a year at Miami Dade College before transferring to Northern Virginia Community College. He entered Virginia Tech last fall, preparing to graduate next year. He was majoring in international relations and minoring in French.

"He did something a lot of ESOL students are not able to do," Cain said. "They just can't separate from home. They go to NOVA or George Mason. But Tech -- that was a stretch." Some might plan to go away to school, but Perez was "one of the ones that actually went through with it," she said.

Cain was one of the first to hear about Perez's death last week, in a phone call she got that Monday night. On Tuesday morning she came to school looking for Dragos, who had said, often, to Cain: "We have to figure out a way for him to go to college. We can't let all that talent. . . ." She didn't always finish the sentence. She didn't have to.

When Cain got to school, Dragos and others were talking about the shootings. Cain had to tell them, "We lost one of ours."

"Who?" Dragos asked.

"Daniel," Cain answered, remembering later that saying his name "was like I put a knife right through her."

News of Perez's death spread far. Back in his home country of Peru, media outlets printed and broadcast numerous stories about him and the plight of his father, who was trying to get a visa to come see his son's body. The story was so big that when the elder Perez checked in for his flight to the United States , television cameras were there, filming his departure.

Outside his mother's front door in Woodbridge lay a welcome mat whose message was so faint as to be barely legible: "Home Sweet Home," it read. No one answered the doorbell.

Perez's friend Hugo Quintero said last week that when he arrived at Betty Cueva's home, the reality of his friend's death -- and what it was doing to his friend's mother -- hit hard. "I came into the house," he said, "and when I saw her, I was like: 'Oh, man. That's not good.' "

It's the finality of what happened that's so hard for Quintero and others to grasp: the fact that someone such as Perez, who had overcome so much and was achieving so much more, could be so swiftly snuffed out, in a class -- French -- that he loved and in which he excelled.

Said Quintero, sounding lost at the end of a conversation about his friend: "He was going to be my best man. He was going to be the man who was going to die by my side."

Perez has been remembered as a role model for immigrant students, a kid who came to the United States from a "very humble background," as Quintero said, a kid who had worked hard and made it to a four-year college. And he did it with a smile that everyone, from teachers to co-workers to a former principal, noticed.

"His smile lit up the room," Dragos said last week.

Which is to say, Cain said, that Perez wasn't just a young man intent on success but one who was enjoying his road to success as well.

"He wasn't going to have the American dream," she said. "He was already living the American dream."

Six students from the Washington area were killed in the Virginia Tech shootings. Each will be profiled the day after the funeral this week. Reema Samaha was profiled Sunday, the day after a memorial service for her.