How do you memorialize someone larger than life? For Rocky Lopez, with a giant mural painted on a building in downtown Elgin.
A delivery driver for Menards by day, the aspiring actor also took up tortilla-making, connecting with people and building a following through social media.
That’s where the word “ROCKSWORLD” that the mural spells out came from. It was Lopez’s self-made catchphrase and a term that could be found among his posts to his thousands of Facebook followers.
“He would tell people you can accomplish anything in life as long as you put your mind to it, and you have faith,” says Ravin Lopez, his wife.
Rocky Lopez died in a motorcycle crash Aug. 8. in West Dundee. He was 53.
People in Elgin rallied to honor him.
“Just to see so many people that he touched their lives somehow come together and show so much love and respect, it was out of this world,” Ravin Lopez says.
The idea of a mural to memorialize Rocky Lopez started on Facebook, with neighbors calling for artists to help create a tribute to the aspiring actor, who’d played gangster-type characters in short films.
Muralist Joel Amore had met Lopez at Dream Hall, 51 S. Grove Ave., the building where the mural went up.
Lopez was making and selling his homemade tortillas there.
“The very first time I started painting, Rocky was a silly dude, he’d jokingly pick on me and crack jokes,” Amore says. “We just were cool. I would see him every weekend when I would paint there. He was always working early mornings, late nights.”
Fellow artist Javier Pretelin Sanchez, who goes by Azuna, didn’t know Lopez but knew the wall where the mural would be painted. Amore had established it as a rotating canvas for murals that most recently occupied by Sanchez’s “Si se puede” mural.
Sanchez says he started to get a sense of Lopez as people stopped by as he and Amore worked on the mural.
“Two strangers could come at the same time, and they’d be, like, ‘I knew Rocky,’ and the other would be, like, ‘Oh, yeah, you knew Rocky? I knew Rocky,’ ” Sanchez says. “They would talk to each other and leave as friends because of the connection through Rocky.”
His wife says that’s what Lopez’s life was about — connecting people. As a delivery driver, she says he’d go out of his way to be friendly with customers, and online he used his platform to help people experiencing homelessness and to give an ear to someone looking for a friend.
“He would literally take the shirt off his back for anybody,” Ravin Lopez says.
In the mural, Lopez seems stoic, peering through dark shades with his face tattoos visible.
“You look at him, he looks very intimidating, but he’s like a big Teddy bear,” his wife says. “He was such a lovable person.”
Lopez’s tattoos were filled with themes of faith and family, with his kids’ names inspiring some of them.
Ravin Lopez says he was a dedicated father to his two children and four stepsons and a devoted grandfather to his four grandchildren.
With the mural, Amore says he wanted to tell a story that people could understand even if they didn’t know Rocky Lopez.
“We wanted even people who didn’t know him to experience the journey of him owning a business, him growing and evolving into different characters throughout his career,” Amore says.
Ravin Lopez says the mural has helped her, her family and others who loved him heal from Lopez’s unexpected death.
“I feel like I could hear him say, ‘Wow, babe, that’s dope, that’s so nice, I can’t believe they did this for me,’ ” she says.
