David Bustillos died on June 27, 2016, at 55. He was found unresponsive on the roof of Arizona Mills Mall, where he worked in maintenance.
David and Rachel Bustillos fell in love and eloped to Las Vegas in the same, dizzying year.
They met in 1990 while they were working at an air conditioning company. He left love notes on her car’s dashboard and roses on her desk; it was a romantic streak he kept going through 26 years of marriage.
Around the day he died, the high temperature in Phoenix was 110 degrees. The cause of death, according to the Maricopa County Medical Examiner, was environmental heat exposure. Diabetes played a contributing role in his death.
Rachel Bustillos has three children. They were not David’s biological children, but he was like a father to them. Andrea Ruiz, one of those children, is forever grateful for the practical lessons she learned from David: how to change the oil in her car, replace her own spark plugs and change a tire.
But the “family man,” as Rachel Bustillos described him, was also a workaholic. If he was called to a work emergency at midnight, he wouldn’t think twice about rushing over.
The day her husband died, Rachel knew he wasn’t feeling well. On the phone, he told his wife that he had been assigned a chore on the roof, but he was worried about the heat. Later that day, she was told, another worker found him badly burned near his work site.
“He went to work and to this day I really wish he had stayed home,” Rachel said.