Abstract
On March 12, 1977, shortly after five o'clock in the afternoon, a Volkswagen Safari left a small town in El Salvador known as Aguilares, a small dusty town roughly an hour north of the capital of San Salvador. In the vehicle were three people - an elderly man named Manuel Solorzano, a fifteen year old boy named Nelson Lemus, and a Roman Catholic priest named Fr. Rutilio Grande, SJ. On the way out of town, near the train tracks, the vehicle stopped to give three small children a ride. Their destination was the town of El Paisnal, roughly three miles away, to which Fr. Grande was travelling to continue a novena in celebration of the town's feast day. As the bell was tolling to gather the people near the small church situated in the central plaza of El Paisnal, Fr. Grande and his entourage made their way along the narrow dusty road that connected Aguilares and El Paisnal. Adapted from the source document.