The woman convicted of killing Tejano music legend Selena Quintanilla-Perez has been denied parole after spending decades behind bars for fatally shooting the young singer at a Texas motel in 1995, the state's parole board announced Thursday. Yolanda Saldívar is serving a life sentence at the Patrick L. O'Daniel prison unit in Gatesville, Texas. A three-member panel of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to not release her, the AP reports. The panel said her case will be eligible to be reviewed again for parole in 2030.
The singer known to her fans as simply Selena was one of the first Mexican Americans to make it into the mainstream music scene and was on the verge of crossing over into the English-language pop market when she was killed. Saldívar founded the Grammy-winning singer's fan club and had been the manager of her clothing boutiques, Selena Etc., until she was fired in March 1995 after money was discovered missing. Selena, a Corpus Christi native, was 23 years old when she was shot in the back with a .38-caliber revolver at a motel in Corpus Christi on March 31, 1995. Motel employees testified that Selena named "Yolanda" in "Room 158" as her attacker. The singer died later at a hospital.
"I didn't mean to do it. I didn't mean to kill anybody," Saldívar told police. She said she'd bought the .38-caliber revolver to kill herself and testified that it had misfired. Saldívar was convicted in Houston in October 1995 of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years, per the AP. While in prison, Saldívar—a former nurse—obtained her paralegal and associate degree in criminal justice and filed several civil rights complaints alleging mistreatment by the state's prison system, according to court records. She also helped other inmates to file petitions. She filed several appeals of her conviction, but all were rejected.
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