Like his wife, Rick Salinas never allowed anger or bitterness to chip away at the life he made for himself after he was shot. In a Chicago Tribune story in 2000 about his “Face of America” journey, Salinas told the reporter that after trying to escape the Chicago influences that had lured him into a street gang early in life, he had decided to go snowmobiling with friends in Aurora and was shot, an innocent bystander, in a gang drive-by.