Police ID girl, 15, as victim of Saturday shooting
No suspects yet in slaying near elementary school
Police say a 15-year-old girl was shot and killed Saturday night during a fight near an elementary school in Northeast Albuquerque.
Gilbert Gallegos, an Albuquerque police spokesman, said Angelique Anderson was found fatally injured a short distance from Hawthorne Elementary Park.
He said detectives are investigating and no suspects have been identified.
Officers responded around 7:35 p.m. to a fight at the park, near Copper and Eubank NE.
“Multiple callers stated that multiple individuals were in a fight and shots had been fired,” Gallegos said in a news release.
Police found Anderson with a gunshot wound near the 400 block of General Somervell NE, and she died shortly after.
Vickie Maestas, Anderson’s mother, said the killing doesn’t make any sense.
“How can someone attack someone that sweet?” she asked the Journal. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”
Maestas said her daughter left the house to meet with friends around 3 p.m.
“I braided her hair, (we) talked, we had breakfast,” Maestas said. “She had just left. She said, ‘I’ll be back, Mom.’ ”
Later that night, Maestas found out from a niece’s Facebook post that her daughter had been killed.
“We didn’t know where she was or what happened,” she said.
Maestas said one of Anderson’s friends told her that a fight broke out and that her daughter, caught in the middle, was shot in the face.
“When she got shot, they didn’t stay with her; they just left her there,” she said.
Maestas said her daughter didn’t keep her in the loop about her personal life, but she believes there may have been issues she wasn’t aware of.
“I’m tormented that I lost my daughter in that way; nobody called me and told me my daughter was laying dead up in the Heights,” Maestas said.
Anderson, one of six siblings, was a freshman at Robert F. Kennedy Charter School. Relatives describe the teen as a lover of oldies music, her tabby cat Yao, and spending time with friends and family.
“She was always happy and so friendly,” Maestas said. “Everybody loved her.”
She said she will miss her daughter and watching movies with her and her sisters.
“I will miss her smile, her presence,” Maestas said. “I miss so much about her already.”