Selena Quintanilla died on March 31, 1995 at 23 years of age. More than 22 years after his death, there are still doubts about how it happened.
The day that Yolanda Saldivar shot her in Corpus Christi and while Selena was bleeding to death, her father supposedly tried to avoid a blood transfusion, since, as Jehovah's Witnesses, they do not believe in medical treatments, they practice healing by faith.
However, the doctors pumped three liters of blood but it was too late when trying to save it. According to the NY Daily News, the cardiologist who treated Selena, Louis Elkins, said that by the time he arrived at the hospital, 32 minutes after he was shot, "his heart no longer pumped."
Elkins said he was not aware of Quintanilla's request but that, even if he had been informed, he would have continued the transfusions. "Even though I respect her faith, she did not have the opportunity to tell me to discontinue that treatment," Elkins said during the trial of the singer's death.
The doctor explained that the bullet that killed Selena injured his shoulder, his lung and an artery in his chest, which caused a blood hemorrhage, but he clarified that no amount of blood could have saved the singer. He lost too much blood minutes after Yolanda shot him in a hotel, at a Days Inn.
"Although his heart may have worked again, there was already a brain death," he explained.
Yolanda Saldivar, former president of the singer's fan club and who ran her boutiques, had been fired for embezzling $ 60,000 but kept tax documents, which is why Selena came to see her the night she shot him.
After the incident Yolanda locked herself for more than 10 hours in her truck in the hotel parking lot until she gave up while the police and the FBI were waiting for her at the place. During the trial in Houston, Texas, she was sentenced to jail and will be eligible for parole in March 2025. Yolanda stays locked away from other inmates.
In a couple of interviews he has done since jail, he assured that Selena was pregnant when he killed her, but Chris Perez, widower of the singer, has always denied this.
Since the death of Selena, her father Abraham Quintanilla Jr. has said that as Jehovah's Witnesses they do not celebrate deaths or birthdays. They do not want people to think that their family is part of the commemoration of the birth or death of their daughter.