[url]http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-selena-weapon-found0610jun10.story [/url]
Pistol Used to Kill Selena Destroyed
By LYNN BREZOSKY
Associated Press Writer
June 10, 2002, 3:04 PM EDT
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- The weapon used to kill Tejano singing star Selena was destroyed on Monday under a judge's orders, despite protests from historians who said the revolver was a priceless piece of Mexican-American history.
The .38-caliber Taurus revolver was run through a shredding saw and was scheduled to be thrown into the Corpus Christi Bay. Selena, 23, was killed by the gun seven years ago, just as she was on the verge of crossing over to the English-language market.
The destruction of the weapon was bemoaned by some who said it should be kept for posterity.
"You have literally the smoking gun ... the weapon that killed the symbol of Tejano pride," said Manuel Pena, an ethnomusicologist at Fresno State University who has written several books about Mexican and Mexican-American music. "How often do historians wish they had evidence of things that happened 100 years ago?"
Selena's father, Abraham Quintanilla, and her sister, Suzette, watched as the gun was put through a saw system several times to break it up. Quintanilla then shook the hands of District Judge Jose Longoria, who cleared the way for the weapon to be destroyed.
Long thought missing, the gun was found last month in the Harris County home of the court reporter at the 1995 murder trial. The reporter, Sandra Oballe, said she found it in a box of office materials.
Yolanda Saldivar, who had been president of the singer's fan club, was convicted of murder and is serving a life sentence.
Last week, Longoria ordered the gun's destruction, saying, "It's time to finally bring closure to such tragedy."
Quintanilla said he wanted the gun destroyed.
"Why would you want to keep an instrument that was used to kill a loved one?" he said. "I just wonder if some of those people that don't want the gun destroyed, I wonder if they would feel the same way if their child was killed with this gun."
Selena Quintanilla Perez rose to stardom and won a Grammy during the boom of Tejano music in the early 1990s. She was working on her first English language album before she was killed; it was released posthumously in 1996 and debuted at No. 1.
A movie about her life, "Selena," was released in 1997 starring Jennifer Lopez.
A Selena statue in Corpus Christi draws a steady crowd of visitors, many of whom leave notes of love and grief.
"She is a symbol of the potential that we all have," said Albert Pena, an attorney who has closely followed the Selena case. The city should have a Selena exhibit in a museum, he said, and the gun should have been included.
Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press