EGN NEWS DESK
Yolanda Saldívar, the lady serving a life sentence for the 1995 homicide of Tejano icon Selena Quintanilla-Perez, has doubled down on her declare the taking pictures was unintentional — and argues she ought to be launched from jail.
Saldívar, now 62, hopes to be freed when she’s eligible for parole in March 2025.
“Enough is sufficient,” a Saldívar relative tells The Post. “She looks like she’s a political prisoner at this level. She’s able to get out of jail, as a result of she believes she has greater than served her time.”
Saldívar herself made an analogous declare in “Selena and Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them,” a documentary which premiered final week on Oxygen and is streaming on Peacock.
“I used to be convicted by public opinion even earlier than my trial began,” she mentioned in a jail interview, earlier than insisting that she didn’t intend to kill the 23-year-old star.
Saldívar — a founding father of Selena’s fan membership — has been behind bars since March 31, 1995, when she gunned down the singer throughout a confrontation at a Corpus Christi, Texas, lodge. Selena believed Saldívar had embezzled greater than $60,000 and the singer was planning to fireside her.
During their encounter, Saldívar shot the “Queen of Tejano” within the again. The singer died from blood loss at a hospital later that day.
At trial, attorneys for Saldívar claimed that the taking pictures was unintentional and she or he had meant to kill herself. But a jury disagreed, and sentenced her to life in jail with the potential of parole after 30 years.
Now, Saldívar claims she didn’t embezzle the cash. While she acknowledged within the documentary that she wrote and signed checks to herself, she insisted she did so at Selena’s request to buy aircraft tickets for the singer to go to a plastic surgeon in Mexico, with whom she was allegedly having an affair.
A spokesperson for Selena’s household didn’t return The Post’s request for a remark, however Selena’s father has beforehand denied a lot of Saldívar’s assertions and referred to as her a liar.
The Post has obtained detailed information of Saldívar’s incarceration at Mountain View Unit, a maximum-security girls’s jail in Gatesville, Texas.
Saldivar has filed complaints with the jail — and even a federal lawsuit in 2017 claiming that her residing circumstances have been “unsafe and harmful” after she injured herself by falling off the highest bunk.
The Post has discovered Saldívar plans to quote her security fears as one of many justifications for launch when she’s up for parole subsequent yr.
A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice tells The Post that Saldívar has no blemishes on her document that may hold the board from holding a parole listening to. She can formally request a listening to as much as 90 days previous to her eligibility date.
“She is aware of it’s an uphill battle,” her relative acknowledges, “however she’s hoping that the parole board can have a coronary heart and can parole her. She thinks she deserves it.”
