Lizzbeth Aleman-Popoca tried to end her relationship — the day before she was killed
The day before she disappeared, Lizzbeth Aleman-Popoca was ready and resolved to leave her longtime boyfriend.
She toured a studio in New Haven. It was small, but there was enough space for Aleman-Popoca, 27, and her then 7-year-old daughter. The landlord said she could put up a wall to make the space feel bigger. Plus, her sister Yaneth lived in the same complex. They would make it work. She submitted an application.
After going back and forth with her partner, Jonnathan Jara-Aucapina, she needed a fresh start. There had been too many fights to stay any longer.
“She was going to get out,” said her younger sister Yaneth Aleman. “Trust me. I had never seen her so determined.”
But the day of the apartment tour was the last time Yaneth ever saw her sister. What was supposed to be the beginning of a new era for Aleman-Popoca was abruptly cut short.
Police records allege that JaraAucapina, now 28, strangled his longtime partner. It happened sometime during the midnight hours between June 30, 2020, and July 1, 2020, according to police.
Less than 24 hours after allegedly murdering her, Jara-Aucapina buried her body behind the Italian restaurant in Branford where he worked, authorities have said.
Almost a year after police first brought charges against Jara-Aucapina, the case against him is still in early phases. At Jara-Aucapina’s most recent appearance last month, a judge issued a plea of not guilty on his behalf, according to his attorney Michael Pedevillano from the New Haven Office of the Public Defender. Pedevillano declined to comment further.
Aleman-Popoca was allegedly murdered just hours after she insisted via text messages to JaraAucapina that she wanted no further contact with him and wanted him to pick up his clothes from their home before he departed for work the following morning, police records say. In those final messages, she had warned him not to enter the house, according to the arrest warrant.
“(Nope) I don’t want to see you here,” she wrote in a June 30 text. “So please don’t come today.” Aleman-Popoca warned Jara-Aucapina that he no longer had a place in her life, or in their daughter’s.
Aleman-Popoca remained steadfast in her choices in every text. By the end of the exchange, she had told her former partner that, if he saw her on the street one day, he should turn the other way and leave her alone.
But as Aleman-Popoca asserted her independence, Jara-Aucapina pushed back.
“Sweetie that is not going to happen,” he rebutted, according to the warrant.
The case underscores a grim fact: Numerous studies show the riskiest time for victims is when they are trying to separate from their abuser.
For example, a recent review of 13 fatal or near-fatal intimate partner violence cases by the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence found that 6 cases, or nearly half of them, “involved victims who had recently or at the time of the incident divorced, separated from, or attempted to leave the offender.”
Two days after Aleman-Popoca’s death, on July 3, Jara-Aucapina accompanied her family to the East Haven Police Department to file a missing person report. “Jara-Aucapina concocted a story that Lizzbeth had run off, when he knew that she was already dead,” police would later allege in a written statement.
While Jara-Aucapina attempted to cover his tracks, the AlemanPopoca family made public pleas, asking for information on the thenmissing woman.
“If you heard anything, if you see anything, please speak up. We really need to find her,” said Yaneth at a July 14 press conference. “We don’t know what happened. We’re really worried.”
A day later, and following two weeks of searching, police found her body on July 15, 2020.
It took another five months before authorities arrested Jara-Aucapina, charging him with first-degree murder. Jara-Aucapina has remained incarcerated since his arrest in Dec. 2020. Authorities set his bail at $2 million. His case is still in the pretrial phase, with the next hearing scheduled for Dec. 15.
***
When Aleman-Popoca and JaraAcuapina started dating, they were both about 17: two high school students.
Yaneth never expected her sister’s boyfriend to stick around for so long. They were just kids, she thought. It would pass.
“Nobody ever told me that my sister was going to grow up and start making her own life,” Yaneth, now 27, said of those early days.
As girls, the pair had been inseparable. They remained together in Guerrero, Mexico, when their parents moved to the United States and later moved thousands of miles together once it was time to join their father in Connecticut when they were both teenagers.
But Jara-Acuapina became quickly enmeshed in the family’s life. The couple moved into their own home together almost immediately.
After two years of dating, they had a daughter, whose name the family asked to keep private to protect her safety.
Aleman-Popoca was hardly 19 when the girl was born, but motherhood transformed her. She went from being a bombastic, darkly funny teenager into a woman who was sensitive and dedicated to the new life she had brought into the world.
“I know she was giving her daughter all the love she wished she would have gotten as a girl,” she said.
From her family’s perspective, the relationship between AlemanPopoca and her boyfriend was completely normal until about 2017 when Yaneth alleges he cheated on her with another woman. JaraAucapina’s arrest warrant states that during an interview with police he “admitted to cheating” on Aleman-Popoca in the past.
Aleman-Popoca left him for some time and moved in with her sister for support. But after a handful of months apart, she returned to Jara-Aucapina to restore a modicum of normalcy to her life.
Yaneth, as a devoted little sister, could not easily forgive Jara-Aucapina’s transgressions. Starting then, Yaneth kept a close eye on JaraAucapina, who simultaneously distanced himself from the family.
Still, in the months before her death and disappearance, her sister claims that the relationship between Jara-Aucapina and AlemanPopoca grew more contentious. Yaneth described her sister as a woman who was done “play(ing) house” in a life she was unhappy with. At least twice, Aleman-Popoca left and returned to her partner while trying to figure out her next move.
In at least once instance, these frustrations explicitly turned violent.
Around Memorial Day 2020, about a month before AlemanPopoca’s disappearance, Yaneth remembers she received texts from her sister, who was worried she had a broken arm. After rushing to her sister’s apartment, she recalls seeing her arm covered in bruises. Her right hand was so swollen, her sister compared it to a tamale.
That incident was never reported to police at the time. But during the subsequent police investigation of Aleman-Popoca’s death and disappearance, Jara-Aucapina alleged “he never hit” his girlfriend, “but claimed that she had hit him in the past,” according to the arrest warrant. To police, he claimed that during that incident she “injured her hand, which swelled up.”
After that incident, things shifted. Aleman-Popoca started talking about wanting to find an apartment in the condominium complex where her sister lived.
Yaneth said she did not know what prompted her sister’s sudden change of heart. Yaneth was just happy it was happening and grew hopeful her sister would leave Jara-Aucapina once and for all. She seemed to be getting on the right path.
Yaneth noticed that AlemanPopoca was drawing again, which Yaneth took as a good sign. It was Lizzbeth’s favorite hobby as a girl, one she had dropped years prior to focus on other responsibilities
But so many years later, she was doing just that. It started with little doodles. Before long, AlemanPopoca started designing stickers and decals for cars. She planned to sell them too, but that dream became another opportunity she would never fulfill.
*** Aleman-Popoca left the tour of the apartment that was poised to become her new home with a renewed sense of self. She hopped in the car with her daughter. Full of hope for the future, Yaneth said goodbye and reminded her sister that she loved her.
After that, Yaneth doesn’t know exactly what happened to her sister.
But on July 1, Jara-Aucapina called Yaneth to say that AlemanPopoca was nowhere to be found.
Yaneth assumed her sister had opted to take some time away before embarking on her major life change. Plus, her birthday was on July 2. Taking some time away was normal, even if it did unsettle Yaneth.
Her sister could have never foreseen what would unravel next. The aftermath traumatized her.
Starting on the day she and her father reported Aleman-Popoca missing to the police, Jara-Aucapina attempted to convince the family that she had escaped the country to start a new life. He fabricated a phone number using the free texting app Pinger and impersonated her virtually, according to police records.
More than a year later, Yaneth still vividly remembers the moment she found out her sister had been killed.
After getting a phone call from her stepmother saying that she and her father were coming over, Yaneth remembers opening up her front door only to see a priest and police detective. She remembers the tears breaking past the detective’s lash line, the dizzying confusion and the fierce hug from her father.
Police had found a body behind a dumpster, she remembers the detective saying. Nothing was certain yet, but Yaneth recalls feeling an overwhelming sense of clarity in those moments. She knew her sister was gone.
“In that very moment, I felt my stomach drop out of me,” she said. The next day, on July 16, police confirmed what the family already presumed: the body was AlemanPopoca’s.
Though Jara-Aucapina was the prime suspect in the police investigation and in the family’s eyes, Yaneth said she and her family were told by authorities to stay silent until he was arrested on Dec. 27, 2020, following more than 2,000 hours of police investigation. Soon after the arrest, police said releasing more information earlier would have compromised their investigation.
The silence had eaten away at Yaneth, but it also pushed her toward a life of activism to honor her sister and women trapped in similar situations. In the months after her sister was killed, she yelled “Justice for Lizzbeth” at every opportunity.
And now, she wants justice for every woman of color who has been brutalized by a partner.
Data shows that Black and Hispanic women are vastly overrepresented in intimate partner violence situations.
According to the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “African American females experience intimate partner violence at a rate 35 percent higher than that of white females” and approximately two-and-a-half times the rate of women of other races. Among Hispanic women, 23.4 percent report being victimized by intimate partner violence.
There are plenty of women whose cases never reach the same level of visibility as her sister’s, Yaneth said.
“I have friends, you know, friends that have been mistreated, too,” she said. “They have called the police, and they have taken photos of all the evidence, supposedly.”
She wants justice for all of them, too.