Jonathan Gonzalez loved being outside. Like many 13-year-olds, the Wellington, Florida, resident loved football, basketball, fishing and just being with friends. On Sunday he told his mother, Maria, he was going outside for a bit.
Like she told him every time he’d go out to play, she said “Be careful.”
Gonzalez recounted how her son, who died in a dirt bike crash, was adored by everyone around him.
“You would come in my neighborhood and there’d be 15 to 20 kids asking for him. I’d get so aggravated,” she said first laughing at the memory, then crying. “Now I don’t have that.”
At 1:40 p.m. Sunday, Palm Beach County Fire Rescue crews responded to a call that a dirt bike had crashed into a canal near Oakberry Circle and Oak Hamlet Lane, just north of Forest Hill Boulevard. Jonathan Gonzalez was flown to a hospital as a trauma patient and then died. The 13-year-old's mother said he was on the back of the dirt bike with a friend near their home. The crash remains under investigation, she said.
Gonzalez said her son was the baby of the family. He had two older sisters and a few half siblings, all of whom adored him, she said. Gonzalez said his two sisters go to Palm Beach Central High School and that even their friends at 16 and 17 years old wanted to hang out with her boy, as did his dozens of friends from school and a city football league.
“He was loved by so many people, so many coaches and teachers, and kids. And the kids’ mothers,” she said. “He was a respectful young kid with a big heart.”
On Monday, the Palm Beach County School District said there were grief counselors at Emerald Cove Middle School where Jonathan was a seventh-grader.
Michelle Kaplan, a mother of one of the boys who played on a city football league team with Gonzalez, said the whole team is devastated. She said the team was very tight-knit, constantly texting each other. On Sunday, she said, she got a call from her son Joshua telling her the news.
“He’s gone. I was just playing basketball with him yesterday,” her son told her.
A GoFundMe account was created to help the family pay for funeral costs. Donations exceeded the $10,000 goal in less than 24 hours.
“That’s how much you know this kid was loved and cared for,” Gonzalez said.
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