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Lewis Ayers, captured with King's group of Kentucky riflemen, gave a good account of what happened next...

We wandered about all night endeavoring to reach Goliad, but when day dawned on the 14th [15th] we found ourselves only about 3 miles from the Mission, having lost our way. We hurried on about two miles further, when we were attacked by a party of Mexicans, and were compelled to surrender, our guns being most of them wet, and having no chance to retreat.

We were then marched back to the Mission, tied together two by two, the rope at the same time connecting up altogether, after which we were marched about one mile, where we found a body of the enemy drawn up to receive us, we also found a few friends, who had been picked up one by one, making in the whole 33 men.

The Soldiers loaded their guns to shoot us but in consequence of there being two Germans among the prisoners the execution was postponed at the request of a Col. in the enemy's service who was a German by birth.

Our treatment during the next 24 hours was most brutal and barbarous. I had not asked for neither did I expect any mercy at the hands of the enemy. My wife however with four children presented herself to Gen. Urrea and excited his sympathy by their tears, she was aided by some Mexican officers who were opposed to the barbarous course persued of murdering prisoners, and the General agreed to save my life, which was done, and I was given in some degree my liberty, after receiving a severe lecture on account of my hostility to Mexico and charging me to behave myself better in the future and let politics alone-I merely bowed and said nothing.

...and again, as a measure of those perilous times, the Ayers would shortly lose all four of their children in the space of a week to scarlet fever, folks from all walks of life often having to cope back then with personal tragedies that would boggle the mind today.


So, the prisoners were led out to be shot twice, the first time the German-speaking officer declined to go through with it. That German officer was one Juan Jose Holzinger, an Engineer who had originally relocated to Mexico ten years earlier in the employ of a British concern. Holzinger first came to Santa Anna's attention when he was contracted to build a house on one of Santa's Anna's vast estates.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fhoaa

During the Texas campaign he was Urrea's Chief of Artillery. At Refugio, in addition to the two Germans Ayers mentioned, Holzinger reportedly spared an additional eight men who had been local settlers, and perhaps a few others were impressed as laborers. It is believed that only 15 of the original 33 prisoners were actually marched out and shot the next day, "about a mile" from the mission.

Later that year the scattered remains of these unfortunate men were collected and interred on a hillside not far from the mission, this burial site serving as a nucleus for the establishment of a Catholic cemetery.

The exact location of the gravesite was lost for 98 years, until a construction project by chance unearthed 16 skeletons interred in a mass grave.



...and kudos to whoever in 1934 designed this appropriately 19th Century-styled monument.






Holzinger would go on to save another 25 of Ward's men held at Victoria and would attempt to save more at Goliad.

Along with Urrea and the rest of Urrea's command, he would pointedly be sent to a reserve area later in the campaign, so removing them in Santa Anna's mind from any chance of further acclaim or glory.

Thus, at the time of San Jacinto, Holzinger had been assigned to build a fort at Matagorda on the coast. It was his great good fortune to be captured upon his withdrawal from that place by a Texian force that included some of the very men he had earlier saved. Notwithstanding the fact that he was an officer in Santa Anna's army, Holzinger was shortly thereafter set at liberty with a letter of grateful commendation from Mirabeau Lamar.

He returned to Mexico, where he presumably lived out the remaining twenty-eight years of his life mostly at peace.

Birdwatcher