Just over two years ago, Roberto Muñoz-Soto was shot at Bush’s Pasture Park.On Friday, June 26, the once shy and quiet teenager spoke in front of dozens of community members, elected officials and friends, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a food truck that aims to help teens like him leave behind Salem’s gangs through employment and empowerment. In his speech, Muñoz-Soto said support from the local nonprofit owner who hired him, Sonny Saltalamachia, made the difference.  Muñoz-Soto said Saltalamachia’s work prevented him from searching the streets to avenge his best friend José Vásquez-Valenzuela, who died in the March 7, 2024, shooting. Muñoz-Soto was one of two boys injured that day.“I would’ve been lost,” Muñoz-Soto said.After his speech, Muñoz-Soto joined the three others on the team cooking burritos, tacos, hot dogs and fries in a food truck that plans to serve customers from the Saffron Supply Co. parking lot Monday-Friday, from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. For Saltalamachia, the event represented the latest expansion in his twofold approach of counseling and employment for youth in Salem. He’s the founder of HYB Counseling and the HYB nonprofit running the food truck, which began largely in response to the Bush Park shooting. The celebration was attended by leaders from youth resource provider Punx with Purpose and members of St. Mark Lutheran Church, along with officials from the city, Marion County and Salem-Keizer School Board. “(It’s) scary to launch something,” Saltalamachia said. “It was humbling … very humbling and very gratifying at the same time.” His counseling practice, HYB Counseling, and nonprofit, HYB, both use an acronym that stands for “Handle Your Business.”  At HYB Counseling, Saltalamachia, with support from two other staff, works with youth impacted by gangs, homelessness, substance use and mental health challenges.The four youth working in the truck got their start doing counseling with Saltalamachia before being hired to cater local graduations, weddings and church events. From left: Zach Hernandez, 17; Roberto Muñoz-Soto, 18; Jayanna Ramos Garcia, 17; and Margarito Martinez, 23, pose for a photo in front of the HYB food truck. The four make up the HYB catering team. (HAILEY COOK/Salem Reporter) Starting up services Before opening his own counseling practice in 2020, Saltalamachia worked at Bridgeway Community Health helping youth experiencing substance use issues.  Through HYB’s work, Saltalamachia provides youth and their families with resources that look very different from “counseling in four solid white walls,” Joe Bosquez, a co-founder of HYB’s nonprofit, said. “I think there’s a lot of well-meaning organizations, you know, ‘Hey, dress properly, wear the nice shoes, tuck your shirt in,’ like that stuff doesn’t go very far with kids, right?” Saltalamachia said. “I just always kind of catered towards the kind of kid that I was, which was the kid that didn’t have a lot of love growing up, didn’t have great relationship with my father, gravitated towards needing that older male approval, and naturally (it) leads towards gangs.” He works with kids as young as 9, teens, young adults and families. He has two other staff who help run family counseling and group support. Most of the kids Saltalamachia currently works with in counseling are on probation, while others are homeless and neurodivergent. Saltalamachia said he can meet youth at their level. Rather than asking the typical “How do you feel about that?” question, Saltalamachia talks to kids in the ways they talk to each other — “‘Why the f— would you do that, bro?’ … ‘What are you doing?’” he said. After making the initial connection with his clients, Saltalamachia builds their trust to take counseling to a “higher level,” he said, where personal and mental health challenges are addressed. “It’s going into an individual’s world and saying, ‘You have heard it said like this: you have to always fight, 10 toes down, no one ever disrespects you, beat him up, even in school.’ We are saying this: you can learn to forgive, you can have an identity outside of being a gang, there’s more to manhood than simply just beating people up, or actually using a gun on them,” Saltalamachia said. Individual counseling sessions can involve video games, making music or playing on the big pool table in Saltalamachia’s office, which is at 2405 Front St. N.E. “It’s kind of like side-by-side counseling, to where, almost like driving in a car, windows down, summertime, music up, driving, talking to your friend, that’s some of the most (safe) time to be vulnerable, and it’s about creating safe spaces to be vulnerable, that way they can move forward,” he said. In the past, he’s taken kids to Detroit Lake, the Oregon Coast and golf courses as part of counseling. Sonny Saltalamachia poses for a photo from inside the food truck. Saltalamachia runs HYB’s counseling practice and nonprofit that employs local teens. (HAILEY COOK/Salem Reporter) He said that the 2024 Bush Park shooting inspired his expansion into nonprofit work two years ago, which he brought to life with Bosquez, who also used to work for Bridgeway.Saltalamachia had already seen the need to bring together moms affected by gang violence when the news about the shooting broke, with immediate and impacts on several Salem families. “When you’re a mother and your son makes the paper for a crime, you still have to go to church, you still have to go to the grocery store, you still have to go wherever in the community. People are going to say, ‘Hey, … how’s your son?’ And what does that mom say in that moment?” he said. “Where does that mom go when her son is the one who’s the perpetrator, maybe kills somebody. That’s the loneliest feeling in the world, I think, for a mom.” He ran the mom groups for two years, where parents came together to talk, and received flowers and ate desserts made by Saltalamachia’s wife. The groups are now run by the Marion County Juvenile Department. Soon after, Bosquez taught Saltalamachia how to make tacos, which were then prepared for some of HYB’s counseling groups. The two wound up catering a high school graduation ceremony for the son of Funaki Letisi, a probation officer with the Oregon Youth Authority and an HYB board member.  “At that point, we started thinking, man, in light of Bush Park, just two months after (the shooting), what can we do?” Saltalamachia said. Letisi’s repeated suggestion came to mind.“‘These kids need a job,’” Saltalamachia said. HYB got its start catering with a $100,000 grant from the Willamette Health Council, and they’ve made a name for themselves at local events, including a recent spring tea at St. Mark Lutheran Church. In November, they bought the food truck with a $50,000 grant from Marion County.  Although Friday was the truck’s official opening, it’s been operating at the plumbing company’s lot since May. Before that, the truck spent around five months at the Windsor Island Golf Center in Keizer.It has given the youth he works with another place to find purpose through employment. “I just think work gives so much to young people, it gives sense of purpose, identity. It’s something to lose. … (It) gives a sense of respect, a sense of pride, does a lot for young people, especially for kids in gangs, because their whole big thing is about identity,” he said. “So much of life is all about identity, so we’re trying to give them a new identity, and then that identity allows them to have new interaction with the community.” After Bush Park Before joining HYB’s catering business a year and a half ago, Muñoz-Soto had been on the receiving end of the counselor’s regular pushes to find a new identity. “I’ll be honest, when I first met Sonny, I didn’t want no help. I just wanted to be by myself. I pushed all the help he tried to get me, I pushed it all the way,” Muñoz-Soto said. “Once he got his mind on something, he’s gonna push forward, especially if it means helping a youth that’s like going through stuff, he’s gonna be stubborn about it. He’s gonna help you.” He said the deaths of his father and his best friend, Vásquez-Valenzuela, changed his mind.One of the last people he spoke to before the shooting was Jeanette Aguirre, a board member of HYB’s nonprofit and his counselor at Roberts High School. Before leaving school on March 7, he asked to talk with her, and she told him, “‘Give me two minutes, I will go pick you up from class’ … and he left,” she said.It was a shock, she said, to learn that later that afternoon the teen was on a life-flight to Portland with critical injuries. The Bush Park shooting came amid a citywide push to address gang violence in Salem and conversations about better intervening and supporting youth. “The kid died in my lap”: witnesses describe tragedy, mayhem as 3 shot in Bush’s Pasture Park McCrae, the teenager who later admitted to the shooting which killed Vásquez-Valenzuela, was sentenced last September to MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility, where he can be held until he’s 25. The morning after the shooting, Saltalamachia helped lead a group for students and community members at Roberts, Aguirre said. “We had a lot of youth in the building who were gang-affiliated … so we really didn’t know how the school climate was going to be that morning,” she said. “Luckily, he showed up and we were able to hold safe spaces for groups of students to be able to go through the motions of what had happened.” Saltalamachia’s help, through counseling and the catering business, gave Muñoz-Soto a reason to keep going, the teenager said. As the oldest kid in his family, and with a single mother, he said he needed to bring in money, which the catering job did. “I was really depressed. I was really low for a while. Sonny, he was kind of like the sun, I guess,” Muñoz-Soto said. Over the last few years, he went from telling Aguirre that he would never graduate high school and that he thought school was stupid, to getting As and Bs, she said. Her first challenge to him had been to aim for Ds. He ended up graduating from high school in 2025, one year early, she said. Roberto Muñoz-Soto, 18, laughs with his friends after serving dozens of people tacos, burritos and hot dogs at the grand opening of the HYB food truck. Muñoz-Soto, a survivor of the 2024 Bush Park shooting, addressed the crowd of guests before lunch. (HAILEY COOK/Salem Reporter) “If I could save one kid, I have done my job, and I mean, right now he’s now one of many, but he gave me a chance … he gave me an opportunity to try to show him the way, to connect him with resources, and so for me, I think it provides just healing,” Aguirre said. This summer, Muñoz-Soto will keep working at the food truck while waiting for the call to go fight wildfires in Oregon.  That interest came from his late father, who fought fires before him.When the chance came to join a crew, “I took it,” he said.  Muñoz-Soto also plans to continue his education and wants to study criminal justice at Chemeketa Community College. To Saltalamachia, seeing Muñoz-Soto’s growth over the years is one example of how he gets to be part of raising up the kids he helps and works with. “To watch him go from a shy, angry, hurt kid to then being a kid who’s willing to be vulnerable and stand in front of a group of people and speak, I mean, that’s the paycheck right there,” he said. Contact reporter Madeleine Moore: [email protected]. SIGN UP: Subscribing to Salem Reporter helps sustain in-depth, local reporting that Salem depends on. Invest in your community’s news. Subscribe today. The post After Bush Park shooting, one counselor is addressing gang violence through employment appeared first on Salem Reporter. ...read more read less