New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Grieving father waits for answers
Police investigate death of East Haven woman
NEW HAVEN — Lizzbeth Aleman-Popoca, the East Haven mother whose remains were found July 15 behind her common-law husband’s employer, LoMonaco’s Ristorante Italiano in Branford, was in the process of finding a new home for herself and her 7-yearold daughter when she disappeared, her father said.
Aleman-Popoca, 27, and her daughter had already moved out and stayed with her sister for a while before
moving back in with Jonnathan Jara-Aucapina several days later, Aleman-Popoca’s father, Albino Aleman Sedeño, told Hearst Connecticut Media.
The couple was not married but referred to each other as “husband” and wife,” police have said. Jara-Aucapina, a native of Ecuador, was the father of Aleman-Popoca’s daughter, said Aleman Sedeño.
Aleman Sedeño said he could not say how his daughter died — and is still waiting for the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and police to act.
Meanwhile, he had been thinking a lot about Lizzbeth as he prepared to pay his last respects to her. The state medical examiner’s office has not yet determined a cause of death for AlemanPopoca and said doing so would take several weeks.
“Now what?” Aleman Sedeño, 47, asked while sitting on the back steps of his home in a multi-family house in the city’s Fair Haven Heights section.
The conversation moved back and forth between English and Spanish. Aleman Sedeño speaks some English, but even after 19 years in this country is still more comfortable in Spanish.
When Aleman-Popoca was a little girl, Aleman Sedeño used to carry his oldest daughter on his shoulders down in the state of Guerrero in southern Mexico, he recalled.
“When she was 2 years old, I loved her and she loved me — she always rode on my shoulders,” he recalled, his eyes misting up as he spoke.
Aleman-Popoca also used to love it when he would take her to a small variety store in Guerrero, best known to the rest of the world as the state in which Acapulco is located, and buy her candy or some other treat, he said.
“We’d get something for her, maybe something sweet,” he recalled.
“I love her a lot,” Aleman Sedeño said in a separate interview a few days earlier. “She was very important to me.”
Aleman-Popoca was last seen alive on July 1. The family made a subsequent plea for help and information from the public.
Aleman Sedeño came to the United States in 2001, initially by himself, to find a better life — and worked hard over the years to build that life, raising two daughters along the way after bringing them over to join him several years later.
For the past seven years he has been blessed with a beautiful granddaughter, as well, he said.
He just never thought coming here would result in him losing his oldest daughter the way he did — and, unable to bring her back, what he really wants now is justice, he said.
“This Saturday, we’re going to say goodbye to my daughter,” Aleman Sedeño said matter-offactly.
He still can’t believe it’s true. Aleman-Popoca’s remains were found buried in a shallow grave behind the dumpsters at LoMonaco’s Ristorante Italiano on Route 1 in Branford, several days after her father, sister and husband reported her missing.
For the past few days, Aleman Sedeño and his younger daughter, Yaneth Aleman, 24, had scrambled to find a funeral home to handle the arrangements, including cremation of AlemanPopoca’s remains, even as they tried to raise money for the funeral via a GoFundMe campaign.
They now have one in a nearby community that was able to help them say goodbye to AlemanPopoca Saturday.
Dozens of people Aleman Sedeño
doesn’t even know have joined his friends and relatives as contributors to the fundraising campaign.
He has been touched by their generosity, which as of Friday afternoon had raised $9,485 toward a $50,000 goal to create a “Lizzbeth Aleman-Popoca Fund” to pay for the funeral and future needs of Aleman-Popoca’s daughter. On Thursday, he thanked them all — 188 donors as of Friday — for their generosity.
“I have to thank them for that one. They are great with the feeling,” he said.
He wrote on the GoFundMe page, “My little granddaughter will never see her mother again; pain invades our lives and only someone who lost a child can understand my suffering . ... God bless you always and thank you for your support.”
Beyond the funeral, Aleman Sedeño doesn’t know what to do.
Aleman Sedeño and Yaneth Aleman, who could not be reached for comment, have said previously that right now, “we need to find justice for her.
“She deserves it. She’s a good person,” Yaneth Aleman, who is taking care of her older sister’s daughter, told Hearst Connecticut Media July 16. “... She was a good mother. She loved the baby. She was sweet . ... She didn’t deserve to die the way she did.”
East Haven police Capt. Joe Murgo said police still are waiting for the medical examiner to determine the cause of death — and hoping to make progress in the coming week. Police at this point can’t even say Aleman-Popoca was killed.
“We understand that that family wants justice. They’re going to get it,” Murgo said. “But these things take time.”
Right now, police are “in the process of putting everything together,” Murgo said. “Hopefully, this next week we’ll have some major developments.”
Aleman Sedeño, who worked at another Branford restaurant until the coronavirus closed it, has since done some landscaping work while otherwise being unemployed. .
Aleman Sedeño said they still have family in Mexico, including the mother of his daughters, whom he divorced in 2003.
Aleman Sedeño, who brought his two daughters over to live with him about 8 years after coming here himself — when Lizzbeth was 16 and Yaneth was 13 — said his ex-wife “has not been present” in his daughters’ lives.
He said he and his family had tried to break the news to his granddaughter slowly, “little by little.” But by now, “I think she knows what’s happening,” Aleman Sedeño said.
He said he also believed that Aleman-Popoca’s mother is aware of what happened, although he said he hadn’t spoken to her in many years.
Asked what brought him to this country in the first place, Aleman Sedeño said, “In Mexico, there are many people — and no work.”
Here, “I found a place to live” and he has been able to work.
“It’s better,” Aleman Sedeño said.