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Nearly 30 years after Yolanda Saldívar murdered Mexican-American icon Selena Quintanilla, she is seeking parole.
E! THS: Selena Quintanilla & Christina Grimmie
Yolanda Saldívar is seeking an early release.
Nearly 30 years after she was convicted of killing Selena (full name Selena Quintanilla Perez) in 1995, the former employee of the Queen of Tejano Music has filed a petition for parole in Texas, according to online records from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice viewed by E! News.
Although she has already submitted for parole, the review process will not begin until March 30, per TDCJ. The 64-year-old is currently serving a life sentence for murder with a deadly weapon after she shot and killed Selena at a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Selena was just 23 at the time.
Leading up to her murder of Selena, Yolanda was the president of the “No Me Queda Más” singer’s fan club, and began managing Selena’s boutiques. However, Selena and her widower Chris Perez had fired Yolanda days before the murder, noting that she had been allegedly embezzling money from them and they, per Perez’s testimony at Yolanda’s appeal, “did not trust her.”
In addition to appealing her initial guilty murder sentence in 1998, Yolanda has maintained that she “did not intend” to murder Selena when she shot her in the back.
Meanwhile, Selena’s father Abraham Quintanilla recently put Yolanda on blast after she was featured in Oxygen’s Selena & Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them last year, where she said again she did not intend to kill Selena. The 85-year-old told TMZ that his family “did not support” the documentary project, and that he “absolutely wants nothing to do” with Yolanda, as “everything she says is nothing but lies.”
Chris, for his part, has previously opened up on the trauma caused by his late wife’s death.
“It was the hardest thing up until that point that I had ever had to go through," Chris previously explained in E!’s True Hollywood Story Death of Innocence documentary. “I miss her face, her laughter. She was just an amazing soul, an amazing spirit. I heard fans that were like, 'How could we let that happen?' Come on now. You think that I would let anything happen to her? Like seriously? None of us thought that that was even a possibility.”
He noted that Yolanda’s killing of Selena was a shock for everyone close to her due to Selena and Yolanda’s former bond.
“On the road we had security, so I never really feared for her safety,” he continued. “You know, especially the way it happened to her, the fact that one of her friends did that, it's just unbelievable.”
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