Stories of this kind tend to create fresh nihilists. After all, what could seem more plausible evidence of a meaningless universe than a mother of eight shot to death?
The victim’s family, including her surviving children and their grandmother, will need all the support they can get to avoid slipping into that kind of despair. For the rest of us, the time has come to fix our decaying society.
According to KTVU in Oakland, California, 33-year-old Maria Ramos lost her life in the city on Aug. 7 after she appeared to boldly confront a group of teenagers whom she suspected of selling drugs to one of her children.
Surveillance video showed Ramos and her mother, Blanca Velasco, driving Velasco’s Toyota RAV4 toward another Toyota filled with teenagers. The driver’s side door on the suspects’ Toyota appeared open when the mother and daughter approached.
According to Velasco, Ramos saw the suspects’ vehicle near her mother’s home and decided to confront the teenagers, for she suspected them of selling marijuana vape pens to one of her eight children.
“Our plan was to tell them, stop coming to our house,” Velasco said.
In the video, Ramos jumped out of her mother’s car and apparently sprayed pepper spray into the suspects’ back seat.
The KTVU report indicated that a 16-year-old boy then got out of the vehicle and opened fire.
In the surveillance video, however, Ramos appeared to recoil almost immediately after approaching the suspects’ Toyota. Then, after she seemed to stagger and retreat from the vehicle, someone emerged from the rear passenger’s side.
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Ramos, apparently wounded, then ran out of view behind some parked cars. Velasco drove away, though not before hitting the brakes, which suggests that she probably looked back in her daughter’s direction despite the suspects pointing a gun at her.
Finally, the 16-year-old returned to the Toyota, and it drove away.
The surveillance video ended after only 22 seconds.
According to KTVU, however, Velasco returned to find her daughter motionless.
“I started rubbing her chest and telling her, ‘Breathe, Lupita, breathe! Like, we still need you. You have 8 kids.’ And she tried,” the grieving mother said.
Readers may watch the surveillance video, which has gone viral on social media, below:
WARNING: The following video contains graphic violence that some readers might find disturbing
NEW: Mother of 8 shot and killed in Oakland after confronting ‘teens’ she suspected of selling ‘marijuana vape pens’ to one of her children
“Our plan was to tell them, stop coming to our house”
Maria Ramos, 33, apparently sprayed pepper spray into the back seat of the suspects’… pic.twitter.com/USWamdXwjW
— Unlimited L’s (@unlimited_ls) August 18, 2024
Thanks to a murderous teenager, Ramos left behind one son and seven daughters, aged 1 to 15.
“Her kids were her world to her,” Velasco said.
Now, at least one of those children, a 5-year-old girl, still does not understand what happened.
“She says, ‘I hear mommy is dead, but she’s still coming back from the hospital, right grandma?’” Velasco said according to KPIX-TV in San Francisco. “I would be like, ‘yeah,’ because I don’t know how to tell her she’s not coming back.”
Velasco explained that she and Ramos simply wanted to tell the teenagers to stay away from the house.
“When I saw that they were kids, I’m thinking, they’re kids,” Velasco said. “I told my daughter, ‘It’s just me and you, two girls, no weapons. They’re just probably going to curse us out.’ But it never came to my mind that they would have a gun. My daughter got out of the car, she looked at me and turned around. As she turned around, I just saw her running and I heard the bang. It just happened so quick.”
Indeed, as the surveillance video showed, everything happened in a matter of seconds.
Velasco then explained that the suspects pointed a gun at her and followed her after she drove away, which the surveillance video did not capture. After they fled, she returned to find her daughter dying.
To compound the horror, Oakland’s city services failed the two women.
“It’s very upsetting that when we called 911, they put you on hold,” Velasco said. “I was like, ‘Baby please, your kids still need you and I need you. Please breathe slowly.’ And she did, she was breathing with her nose. She did it like five times.”
Understandably, Velasco wants the teenagers to pay for their unthinkable crime and for life in California’s urban hellhole to improve.
“I want justice for my daughter,” Velasco said. “The way they took her life was so unfair. Oakland is very bad, and I don’t see any changes. I just see it get worse every day.”
Ramos’s eight children almost certainly will never stop grieving their mother. Their pain might even produce resentment as they grow older. If that happens, they will need people of faith to help them navigate what at times might feel to them like a cruel universe.
Meanwhile, people of faith have more work to do. A society in which a teenager guns down a mother of eight in broad daylight is a decaying society.
In short, we cannot prevent all tragedies, but we must find a way to rescue this decaying society from itself.
