El Paso man with no remaining family invites community to shooting victim wife’s funeral

An El Paso man whose 63-year-old wife died in the Walmart shootings invited the public Tuesday to her funeral service later this week, saying he has no other family.

Margie Reckard was “an angel” to Antonio Basco, her husband of more than two decades. And with his late wife’s passing, Basco says there is no remaining family, so he is opening up her funeral to the community.

Services for Reckard will be held on Friday from 5 to 9 p.m. at Perches Funeral Home at 4946 Hondo Pass in northeast El Paso. The funeral home director told ABC-7 that his chapel will hold about 200 people, and he hopes it will be filled for the service.

Basco said that he and Reckard were together for 22 years, and her kindness and selflessness were incomparable.

“I mean you didn’t even have to be there to talk to her. You could just look at how she was, how she acted, how she presented herself. She was an awesome lady,” he recently told The Associated Press. “You see Margie, more or less, was the brains of the family.”

Basco said he and Reckard knew there was something between them as soon as they met, and their life together was like something out of a fairy tale. Reckard was the strong one, he said, and she’s “going to be missed a lot.”

“We were gonna live together and die together,” he said. “That was our plan.”