15-Year-Old Oxnard Girl Found Slain Was Pregnant

Always running away from home, 15-year-old Gabriela “Gabi” Maldonado was a restless girl who wasn’t sure what she wanted in life.

That is, until she got pregnant seven months ago.

“Oh, she was so happy,” said Alvina Rodriguez, 25, a friend who let Gabi live with her and her family. “Most girls if they found out they were pregnant at 15, they’d be depressed. But she was really happy. She wanted that baby.”

But Gabi never got the chance to be a mother.

Her body, lying face down in the dirt by Victoria Avenue, was found early Wednesday morning with bullet wounds to her head and her pregnant belly.

There was a small pool of blood at the curb and where Gabi’s body had been and several bullet shell casings, making it appear that she had been shot at the side of the road, and then either dragged or pushed over the embankment.

Rodriguez last saw Gabi the evening before, arguing with her boyfriend, Edgar Fuentes, 22. The two then left Rodriguez’s house together.

Rodriguez said that Fuentes told her that he had gone out with Gabi and then dropped her back home about 11 p.m. He told Rodriguez that he watched Gabi walk over and talk to two girls who were standing by a white car that had its engine running.

But Rodriguez said Gabi never came home that night.

Fuentes was being questioned by detectives late Thursday, said Capt. Bill Montijo, but he was not officially a suspect in the killing.

Told by detectives Wednesday night that her daughter had been killed, Gabi’s mother, Maribel Contreras, found it difficult to accept the news.

On Thursday the reality of her daughter’s death had finally sunk in.

“What am I going to do now?” said Contreras, choking back sobs. “I have no answer for that question. Who is going to return my daughter to me?”

Contreras said she struggled over the past year to rein in her daughter, who seemed desperate to break free from her family and go out on her own.

She hadn’t always had such a struggle with her daughter.

Gabi was born in Mexico and moved with her family to Oxnard when she was just months old. She attended local schools, going to Juanita Elementary, Rose Avenue School and Frank Intermediate, her mother said.

At Frank Intermediate, staff members remembered Gabriela as a good student who never caused problems. Some were moved to tears when they learned that she had been gunned down.

“She had a good junior high school career. . . . This is a kid we never thought would have ended up in this kind of trouble,” Principal Pete Nichols said.

*

Gabi did well early on in school. But things started to change when she hit her teens. She started running away from home, her mother said, and would sometimes stay away for days at a time.

“I would call the police and report her as a runaway, and sometimes they would bring her back,” said Contreras, who has two other children, ages 7 and 9. “But I stopped reporting her because it just continued. She was very good when she was in my house. We wouldn’t have any problems until she would leave.”

Gabi started living with Rodriguez about a year ago in a modest La Colonia home, just a few blocks from her mother.

Contreras said she last saw her daughter Sept. 8, and she said that although she suspected Gabriela was pregnant, she didn’t know for sure until investigators told her so while delivering news of Gabriela’s death.

Wednesday night when detectives talked to her, Contreras could not believe that her daughter was dead.

She called the Rodriguez home and asked for Gabi.

“My brother talked to her and said she was really worried-sounding and asking him to tell Gabi to call her when she got in,” Rodriguez said. “It was like she was going through denial.”

*

Rodriguez said she did not know that Gabi had died until she saw the news Wednesday morning. She saw a picture of the body lying face down on the dirt embankment near the roadway.

Rodriguez recognized her friend’s blue Wrangler jeans, brown flannel shirt and black sandals lying a few feet away. The news accounts did not give Gabi’s name, but Rodriguez knew when she read a description of the girl, including her deformed left hand.

“I just started crying,” she said. “I never knew something bad like this could happen to someone close to me.”

Rodriguez said she had tried to protect Gabi from older men, but accepted her relationship with Fuentes.

“I figured because he was the father of her baby that it was all right for her to go out with him,” she said.

Authorities could not confirm whether Fuentes was the father of the child.

*

Gabi had met her boyfriend about seven months ago while walking down McKinley Street near her mother’s home. Fuentes was with a group of young men driving by in a car and whistling at her. He was the quiet one in the back seat, Rodriguez said.

Few of her friends ever saw Fuentes, who did not call very often, and seldom visited. When Gabi wanted to talk to her boyfriend, she had to page him.

“The only reason I ever saw him is that I insisted on going out there to meet him,” Rodriguez said. “I was her friend, but I was also kind of like a parent and I would make sure she stayed out of trouble and would go to school.”

When Gabi did not show up for school, school administrators knew to call Rodriguez.

Rodriguez said Gabi had moved out of her mother’s home because she wanted to be on her own. When she moved in with Rodriguez, Gabi was lonely, had few friends and was occasionally suicidal. That all changed when she became pregnant.

“I think that’s just what she wanted,” Rodriguez said.