Al Maldonado said he was hoping for a quiet holiday with his family this year. But now, one of his two food trucks is gone.
It comes after the death of an uncle and with his father in a hospital.
"I took my 401(k) out and I put every single penny into that dream," Maldonado said.
It's a dream that has become a nightmare.
"Some lowlife took my dream away, and it's devastating to my family," he said.
Last Thursday, Maldonado said he received a call that the second of his two food trucks was stolen from its location off I-10 near Boerne. He was in South America at the time.
It was the second call with bad news he said he received there.
"My mom called me and said, 'Son, you need to come home. Your dad is in bad shape.'"
On top of that, Maldonado's uncle died right before his food truck disappeared.
It happened on the same day several other San Antonio food trucks got held up at gunpoint.
San Antonio police are investigating those hold-ups.
"Death in the family, a dream that was about to blow and everything just hit bottom," Maldonado said, but he's determined to rise above this challenge.
"(I'll) probably go out there and start knocking on doors if I have to, to sell as many tamales as I can sell for Christmas."
He may not need to do that. He said a friend who owns a snow cone truck offered to let him borrow it to sell his tamales.
The Bexar County Sheriff's Office is investigating the disappearance of his truck. But they said it's too early to tell whether it's related to the robberies of the other food trucks farther south in San Antonio.
