DETECTIVES investigating a 30-year-old murder case have uncovered new clues that link the death of a young beauty queen to other horror crimes.
The family of Mimi Barraza is still begging for justice decades after the 21-year-old mom was shot in the head as she celebrated her birthday.
The mom and former beauty queen was killed as she celebrated her birthday at a friend’s home[/caption]
She was standing outside her home in San Diego, California, on the morning of September 4, 1993, when a drive-by shooter pulled up in a van.
The killer unleashed a spray of bullets from an assault rifle at Barraza and her friends, hitting the young mom in the head and her friend in the leg.
The van, which had been reported stolen, was found abandoned a few blocks away, but the shooter was never found.
Now, the San Diego Police Department has linked the gun to other crimes, NBC affiliate KNSD reported.
Detectives say several other shootings using the same type of assault rifle took place around the time Barraza was killed in the area where she lived.
A 16 year old boy was killed and nine others were wounded in the eerily similar attacks, cops said.
All of the suspected shooters were Hispanic males who were linked to a street gang from Logan Heights, an urban neighborhood in San Diego.
Barraza was the mother of a two-year-old girl who won a Miss Teen San Diego beauty contest, and was preparing to go to college to become a lawyer when she was killed.
Thirty years after her death, her mom, Benita Perez, said the pain never goes away.
“I want justice. They need to pay. They need to pay for what they did,” she told KNSD.
“They took away a beautiful innocent child that hardly ever got to bloom.”
MOM’S HEARTBREAK
Perez said that everything in her life “went blank” after she lost her daughter.
The mourning mother had to cling to her faith in God to keep going and take care of her granddaughter.
“Day after day God walked with me, he carried me. And I finally started opening and coming up,” she said.
“I had to remember my daughter. I had to remember my son. I had to keep pushing and praying and hoping I could move on.”
Perez said her daughter’s killer put their family through severe pain and left them furious at the injustice.
To this day, she’s vowed to never stop fighting for answers.
“Help us. Help us parents,” she said.
“Help the loved ones that need the justice for our family, for someone that you love.”
Meanwhile, a popular website recently helped to solve a 50-year-old cold case.
