Joel Rosario had returned to the jockeys’ room at Pimlico after riding one of the undercard races on Preakness Day in May 2012 and noticed he had several missed calls from his brother Danny.
Without listening to any of the messages, Joel called his older brother, who picked up the phone, crying.
Danny Rosario stopped crying long enough to tell Joel that their older brother Marino had been killed in a motorcycle accident. Marino, a police officer in the Dominican Republic and one of 12 of Rosario’s siblings, had been struck by a truck on his way to work.