Reverend Al Sharpton to deliver eulogy at funeral of teenage girl shot by LAPD
The Rev Al Sharpton will deliver a eulogy on Monday for Valentina Orellana-Peralta, the 14-year-old girl killed by a Los Angeles police officer in a shooting at a clothing store last month.
The funeral service for Orellana-Peralta will begin at 11am at the City of Refuge church in Gardena, south of LA. The family’s attorney, Benjamin Crump, who represented the family of George Floyd, is also expected to speak.
Valentina was shopping for a Christmas dress with her mother on 23 December at a Burlington Coat Factory in North Hollywood when the LAPD officer William Dorsey Jones Jr fired three rounds at a 24-year-old man in the store, killing him and Valentina in the process.
Valentina was in a nearby dressing room with her mother, Soledad Peralta and died in her mother’s arms. “There was nothing I could do. As I lay screaming for help, the police did not come to help me or my daughter,” she said, days after the killing.
Footage of the events at the store showed that the 24-year-old, Daniel Elena Lopez, had assaulted several customers with a bike lock. Jones’s body-camera footage revealed that the officer shot Elena Lopez from a distance, appearing to immediately fire three rounds before issuing any commands. Elena Lopez was standing alone at the other end of a store aisle, had no gun and appeared to be turning away from the officer the moment he was shot. He and Valentina both died on the scene.
Valentina moved to the US from her native Chile six months ago, and her parents said she was excelling at her school, High Tech Los Angeles in Van Nuys, despite English being her second language. She had ambitions for a career in engineering and technology and was interested in building robots. Her parents said her primary dream was to become a US citizen.
“It is like my whole heart has been ripped out of my body,” Juan Pablo Orellana Larenas, Valentina’s father, told reporters. He arrived from Chile days after his daughter was killed, and at a news conference held in his hand a skateboard, still in its plastic wrapping, that had arrived for Valentina on Christmas Eve, the day after she died. He said he would deliver the skateboard to her grave and lamented that the two of them would never get to see LeBron James play basketball in person. “She wanted to be here in the United States because this is the land of opportunity.”
The Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, has called for justice for Valentina’s family, and Joe Biden has offered condolences.
The killing of a young bystander has prompted widespread scrutiny of the LAPD, which shot a total of six people in a nine-day period last month, contributing to a sharp increase in officer shootings and killings in 2021.
LA’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, has said the LAPD will review its tactics, training and policies in the wake of the killing. But the case has renewed calls for the defunding of the department, with critics arguing that ongoing reform efforts have failed to prevent police violence, and that officers must face accountability for misconduct and unjust killings.