LOS ANGELES – Family members of a 14-year-old girl who was shot and killed while trying on dresses at a North Hollywood clothing store during a violent encounter between Los Angeles police officers and a suspect spoke Tuesday at a conference of press.
The teenager’s parents, Valentina Orellana-Peralta, said her biggest dream was to become a United States citizen and watch the Lakers and LeBron James play.
His father, Juan Pablo Orellana, showed the skateboard he had bought to give him as a Christmas gift and said that it had arrived days before his death. He commented that he will take her to his grave so she “can skate with the angels.”
“I am completely devastated,” his father said in a broken voice. “The world came over me”.
“Valentina was something special … all she wanted was to study robotics,” added her father, who was coming to live in the US in a few weeks.
For her part, Valentina’s mother, Soledad, said they were trying on clothes for Christmas when they heard the confrontation outside the store’s dressing room.
“Valentina went to close the door to protect us,” he said in a statement read at the press conference. “We started to hug each other tighter. We were praying. I was praying for her and I think she was praying for me. “Suddenly something hit her. He threw us to the ground and she died in my arms. ”
The family was accompanied by attorney Ben Crump, who represented George Floyd’s family. “They came to the United States from Chile to get away from violence and injustice to have a better life in the United States. They can’t believe this happened in the United States. “
A portrait of Valentina Orellana-Peralta, who was with her mother trying on dresses in the store, was displayed at the press conference in front of LAPD headquarters.
An officer’s body camera video, released Monday afternoon, shows officers firing at a suspect and a bullet going through the wall and hitting the girl while she was in a Burlington store locker room.
Police also shot and killed the suspect Thursday morning at the Burlington store in the North Hollywood area of the San Fernando Valley, police said.
The Los Angeles County medical examiner identified the girl as Valentina Orellana-Peralta and the suspect as 24-year-old Daniel Elena López. Online forensic records show that his autopsies were completed and his causes of death were “gunshot wounds to the chest.”
Officers found the teen dead after seeing a hole in “a solid wall that you can’t see behind,” LAPD Deputy Director Dominic Choi said.
Investigators did not immediately know if she was in the fitting room before the violence started or ran there to hide, she said.
“This chaotic incident that resulted in the death of an innocent child is tragic and devastating for everyone involved,” Police Chief Michel Moore said in a statement Thursday night. “I deeply regret the loss of this young woman’s life and I know that no words can ease the unimaginable pain of the family.”
Moore promised a “thorough, full and transparent investigation” into the shooting.
The California Department of Justice was investigating the shooting, Attorney General Rob Bonta said.
LAPD officers shot at least 37 people, 17 of them fatally, during 2021 after another police shooting occurred on Friday, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Those numbers mark a dramatic increase in the cases in which officers shot or killed people in either of the past two years: 27 people were shot and 7 of them were killed by Los Angeles police in all of 2020. In 2019, the officers shot 26 people and killed 12.
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