Maria Florinda Rios Perez was a mother, a wife and a sister. Her family is seeking justice after she was shot and killed when she showed up to clean a home but was given the wrong address, relatives said.
Her husband, Mauricio Velazquez, said he and his wife had been cleaning homes for seven months. He said he double-checked the address before they arrived at the home where his wife was shot and killed in the Heritage subdivision of Whitestown, Indiana. He spoke through a translator.
“I never thought it was a shot, but I realized when my wife took two steps back,” Velazquez, Maria’s husband, said. “She looked like she’d been hit in the head. She fell into my arms, and I saw that the blood went everywhere."
An autopsy by the Boone County Coroner’s Office determined the manner of death was homicide and that the cause was a gunshot wound to the head. The couple has four children; their youngest is 11 months old. Now Velazquez must raise the family as a single father.
“What I need now is for there to be justice because he took her life in that sense. I don’t believe that’s human. He’s an animal, a dog, a deer, to kill in that way,” Velazquez said. “Now, I am father and mother for my children, for my daughters and he’s happy at home.”
Nichole Armenta of Whitestown started a GoFundMe for the family. Her family wants to have Maria buried in her home country of Guatemala. Armenta said she does not know the family but wants them to be able to access the thousands of dollars in donations that have already come in.
“It gives me hope for humanity, I guess, in a sense that there are so many people out there that have compassion for others even if they don’t know them,” Armenta said.
The Boone County Prosecutor’s Office said the coroner’s ruling does not determine whether the homeowner will be criminally charged. The prosecutor said they will likely have an update on charges sometime next week.
This article was written by Meredith Hackler for the Scripps News Group in Indianapolis.
