He proposed to his girlfriend at a Fair Park concert. Hours later, a fight took his life (2024)

This story is part of The Dallas Morning News’ homicide project focused on sharing the stories of all people killed in Dallas in 2024.

The first few months of James Vara Jr.’s life were spent reconciling with its uncertainty. When he was born Sept. 23, 1998, no one knew if his ceiling would be high school graduation, age 28 or 43.

Vara was born with Treacher Collins Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that in his case, caused facial defects, breathing problems and hearing loss; a childhood consumed by surgeries and hospital stays.

In those days, his parents said, TV shows and video games were some of Vara’s closest friends. With certain hearing aids, he could hear acoustics better than people. He listened to music constantly.

At home in Walnut Springs, a town of less than 1,000 people roughly 90 miles southwest of Dallas, Vara grew to be unflinchingly kind, said Miguel Ponce, a friend of his since the third grade. He greeted everyone with a handshake and a warm “Hey, how are you doing?”

Vara never said no to a chance to work outside, be it bailing hay, mowing grass or cutting firewood. In high school, he bonded with boys his age over watching and playing football.

In 2016, the Walnut Springs Hornets were playing the Cranfills Gap Lions when Vara recovered a fumble. The crowd erupted, Ponce recalled, and when they won the game, it was Vara they thanked for it.

“That just might have been the happiest I’d ever seen him,” Ponce said.

In the last hours of his life, Vara, 26, was daring to dream even bigger.

On Nov. 2, Vara, his girlfriend Vanessa Covey, and his cousin, Benjamin Muniz, went to the Dos Equis Pavilion at Fair Park about 7 p.m. to see Whiskey Myers perform.

“You’re going to be my wife now, OK?” Vara said at the concert, sliding a silver ring on Covey’s finger, his name engraved on the front.

They had been dating for just over a year, but Covey said Vara loved and cared for her 5-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter like they were his own. He’d drive them to school, buy them clothes and tried to be there for the milestones he hadn’t already missed. On a trip to Galveston in June, Vara held her son’s hand through his first time swimming in the ocean.

Vara was their cook, too, and specialized in chicken alfredo. Everything in their kitchen, Covey said, was made with love and extra cheese. They couldn’t keep a block in the fridge longer than two days.

When they’d fight, sometimes Covey would tell Vara he could leave.

“You’re not getting rid of me,” he’d say with a smile. “You’re stuck with me.”

The night of the proposal, about 11:30 p.m., an arrest-warrant affidavit says Vara and Muniz got into a fight in the back driveway of a Pleasant Grove home when Muniz allegedly lifted Vara up and threw him to the ground.

Vara was unresponsive and bleeding from his head when the affidavit said both Muniz and medical personnel tried to help save him. Vara was pronounced dead at the scene. Muniz was jailed on a murder charge.

“Everybody knows, because of his condition, not to lay a finger on James,” Ponce said. “For that to happen, to take all of what he had to overcome away, is something we never could have seen coming.”

A few days before Vara’s funeral, Walnut Springs rallied for a benefit to ease the burden of his service and headstone expenses. His classmates, neighbors, fiancée and even the mayor bought memorial T-shirts and hosted a bake sale with homemade pecan pies and sourdough cinnamon rolls. They auctioned off a custom fire pit, a Remington shotgun, yards of road base dirt and bags of deer corn.

Over and over, they described Vara as a hard worker, a pool shark and a beer connoisseur whose best days were spent laughing alongside his friends.

“It was enough,” Ponce said. “It was more than he hoped.”