‘Stop the deaths’, cry of families of collateral victims

In the living room of her house, on a canvas measuring one square meter, Jenny Chalén has put the photo of her daughter Emily next to a sentence: “Your face of joy will always be our motivation in difficult times, you always had a smile for everyone ”. Jenny looks at the girl’s picture of her every day. She was her first daughter, the one who followed her everywhere. “My, a kite can’t fly without a tail,” Jenny would say, when Emily saw her get out of it and ran after her.

That was until the night of April 23, when 15-year-old Emily was inside the house of a neighbor down the block and in a shootout between criminals a projectile hit his head. “She told me to give her permission, that she was going to her neighbor to teach her Tik Tok. I told him ‘yeah, but not on the street, inside the house’.

Five minutes later, two motorized vehicles passed through his street, at 26 and alley Q, in the western suburb of Guayaquil. Fifteen blocks earlier, at 40th and C, they were chasing and shooting at two men who had taken one of their friends and who were fleeing in a vehicle. Jenny closed the door of her house and the second she opened it to see if her daughter was okay.

When I went to the corner, the neighbor told me ‘your girl, come and see’. I thought she had passed out, but when I went to pick her up she was already covered in blood. The bullet entered her jaw, shattered her teeth. We took her to the hospital with the help of a neighbor, because the ambulance never came.

Jenny Chalen, Emily’s mother.

Emily was hardly breathing anymore. Her foster father, Walter Cuenca, still caught up with her alive. “I told him ‘don’t go, mija, you’re going to leave me alone,’ and he fainted. He looked at me as if to say, Dad, I don’t want to go,” recalls Walter, a military instructor who was proud of Emily because she wanted to be like him, to follow the military life.

Emily was enrolled in the Otto Arosemena Gómez school. “She was not on the street, but in a house. The sector is quiet, this had never happened, I thought my daughter had fainted, ”says Jenny while she asks the authorities to stop the violent deaths, so that there are not so many collateral victims.

Stop the deaths, we cannot allow more innocent victims, who have nothing to do with their fights, they not only kill each other but also kill our children and leave us mothers dead alive, because, practically, it is a pain that is never surpassed. One child is not the same as the other, she was the joy of the house, the funny one, she slept with me, where she went she wanted to go

Jenny Chalen, Emily’s mother.

There was no investigation of Emily’s death in the Prosecutor’s Office. The family did not file a complaint.. Jenny assures that a policeman came to her house, left her a piece of paper and “didn’t come back.” No detainee. “When I denounce, no one is going to return my daughter to me, they take him prisoner, they sentence him, but no one is going to return my daughter to me, rather the people of that man may want to harm me.”

A month ago, she says, a cousin of hers who has a lawyer husband asked her for authorization to approach the Judicial Police and hear about the case: “They told her that the investigating officer had been changed, we don’t know anything else, the lawyer is investigating.” . (YO)