Pamela Cabriales: Family in fear as woman shot dead like her brother 30 years ago 'for no reason'

DENVER, COLORADO: Thirty years after her older brother was shot and killed, the family of a Denver mother who was shot twenty times in the head following a minor traffic accident is once again fighting for justice.

"We lived through it before and now we have to live through it again,” stated Alex Cabriales, whose 32-year-old younger sister Pamela Cabriales was killed in 2021 while traveling home.

Prosecutors claim that the gunman was a 14-year-old wannabe member of a gang. 

Pamela Cabriales' brother was shot dead 30-years-ago

According to Alex Cabriales, their brother Noel, then 15 years old, was shot and killed on November 20, 1994, by a man who would go on to serve less than four years in prison.

According to KUSA-TV, which cited reports from local newspapers at the time, 19-year-old Jesse Gonzales opened fire on the younger boy because he thought he was attempting to steal a dog in front of his Denver home.

When Cabriales' brother was killed, he was eight years old. "Like my sister, he was also shot for no reason," Cabriales said. "He was just standing on the wrong sidewalk."

Gonzales served roughly half of his six-year sentence after accepting a plea deal on a manslaughter charge, although he was first charged with murder, according to KUSA.

Cabriales reported that his parents, immigrants from Mexico, were not given any guidance by prosecutors during the legal proceedings and did not speak English.

"They didn't know they had to fight back then, but we do now," Cabriales said. He is still upset that the person who killed his brother did not receive a longer sentence. He is committed to seeing his sister's case go in a different direction.

"To this [justice] system, my brother was just another dead Mexican," he said; but Pamela felt that there had to be a more equitable outcome.

“You have to fight for justice because you can’t rely on the justice system to be fair." The Cabriales family has been devastated by the deaths of Noel and Pamela.

"People say, well finally you can finish this trial and get some closure and start a new chapter in your life, but that’s not true," Cabriales stated. "There's never closure on this. We just learn to live with it."

Pamela Cabriales' family lives in fear

The family — which now includes Pamela's eight-year-old son — lives in fear due to the trauma of her violent death.

"He'll get up crying in the middle of the night saying, 'I miss my mommy, something bad's going to happen to my daddy, I need to call my daddy,'" according to the boy's uncle.

“It messes with me," said Cabriales, the sole surviving sibling, "because I'm ready to be shot at any time."

Remi Cordova, 17, has been charged with first-degree murder. He'll face an adult trial.

Driving home from a dinner out on February 20, 2021, Pamela struck the back of a car by mistake as she approached a stoplight in Denver.

Prosecutors claim that Cordova, who was in the car she struck, got out and shot her up to 20 times in the head with an AR-15 because he wanted to "earn his stripes" and join the Eastside Crips gang.