The grieving dad of US tourist Kevin Mares — the New Yorker who was shot dead while on a trip to Puerto Rico for a Bad Bunny concert — spoke out on Monday for the first time since the tragic incident.
“It’s very hard,” a heartbroken Hector Mares told The Post. “Yesterday was a hard day. We’re still in pain. He was a beautiful person.”
Kevin Mares, 25, on Sunday was partying at a bar in La Perla, a shantytown on the outskirts of Old San Juan when shots rang out during a dispute — with the Queens resident and other bystanders hit by the bullets.
He was rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
“Preliminarily, it was a dispute that had nothing to do with this tourist which arose in front of this business in La Perla,” local police Sgt. Arnaldo Ruiz told Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Dia news outlet.
Mares was in Puerto Rico with his longtime girlfriend, Angy Nicole Arguello, for a Bad Bunny show, part of the rapper’s 30-day residency on the Caribbean island.
According to his family, Mares had planned to propose to his girlfriend of seven years.
“I’m just devastated,” Arguello told the Daily News. “Like, I can’t believe it. I’m in denial.”
She added: “Every time he’d walk into a room, it would light up … And he was honestly a genuine, trustworthy person. Any problem that I had, he always had my back.”
Arguello took to Instagram to post moving memorials to her slain beau.
“My love, I love you,” she wrote. “I miss you so much. Why, God, did you take him away from me?”
The slain man’s father has now set up an online fundraiser on GoFundMe.com to help raise funds to bring Mares’ body back to the Big Apple, with the site raising more than $31,000 by midday Monday.
“The wound is very fresh,” Mares’ cousin, who identified herself only as Christina, told The Post. “We just want the body to come home. That’s what we’re working for.
“The family’s exhausted,” she said. “As of now they want to find out what’s the process, what’s with the criminal part of it, why aren’t they releasing the body? The family just wants the process to speed up.”
— Additional reporting by Kevin Sheehan
