✝️ Melissa Ramirez, age 28 – September 3 2018, Laredo, Texas, USA 🇺🇸💔
Melissa grew up in Rio Bravo, Ramirez learned to play Mexican folk music on a wheezy accordion, and she memorized the lyrics to Selena’s pop songs, always singing along when they played on the radio. Whenever the ice cream truck drove up and down Rio Bravo’s worn streets, she begged her mother for spare change so she could buy ice cream for her friends who had no money.
Melissa had been a good student. But when she was 13, she was raped by an uncle of one of her friends, and her life began to spiral. She dropped out of high school, became addicted to Xanax and other prescription drugs, and eventually turned to crack cocaine.
She had been walking the streets in San Bernardo for nearly a decade. Melissa sometimes came home with a busted lip or a bruise on her face, but she didn’t talk much about her life on San Bernardo.
Melissa loved ‘80s ballads, watching cartoons on TV late at night and getting into tickle fights with two of her kids, Cristina, 7, and Alan, 3.
A few weeks before her body was found, Melissa Ramirez shared a premonition she had with her mom and sister-in-law: She will be murdered with a gunshot to the head within a month, she told them. Two weeks later, that’s exactly what happened.
In the interview with investigators, serial killer Juan David Ortiz said that after Melissa had injected the drugs he’s bought for her, she’d passed out and that ‚angered‘ him.
Serial killer Ortiz was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty at the request of victims’ families. One relative had told Webb County District Attorney Isidro R. “Chilo” Alaniz that death would have been “letting him off too easy,”
