A mother of four who cleaned homes for work in Indiana was fatally shot by a homeowner Wednesday morning after mistakenly trying to enter the wrong address with her husband by her side.
Maria Florinda Rios Perez de Velasquez, a 32-year-old immigrant from Guatemala, had been cleaning homes for seven months with her husband, Mauricio Velasquez, and he double-checked the address in Whitestown before they arrived, he told local news station WRTV.
“I never thought it was a shot, but I realized when my wife took two steps back,” Velasquez said. “She looked like she’d been hit in the head. She fell into my arms, and I saw that the blood went everywhere.”
Police arrived at the home, responding to a 911 call reporting a “possible” residential entry in progress, and found Velasquez’s wife on the front porch with a gunshot wound, according to a statement shared by the Whitestown Metropolitan Police Department. Officers tried to “attempt life-saving measures,” the statement said, but found she was already dead.
“It’s not easy when the person you love — your partner at home — is taken from you just like that. For me, at that moment, seeing my wife in my arms, already lifeless, covered in blood, I felt like they tore everything from me,” Velasquez told NBC affiliate WCNC.
