The woman serving a life sentence for the 1995 murder of “the Queen of Tejano” Selena will soon learn if she’s been granted parole — and family members tell The Post that she now believes that the singer is at least partly responsible for her own death.
Yolanda Saldívar fatally shot 23-year-old superstar “Queen of Tejano” Selena Quintanilla-Perez on March 31, 1995, in a hotel room in Corpus Christi, Texas, during a confrontation.
The singer believed that Saldívar had embezzled money from her and was going to fire her.
But the 64-year-old prisoner now says that the singer’s demeanor escalated the situation to the point of violence.
“[Yolanda] knows what she did was wrong and she takes responsibility for it,” a family member tells The Post. “But she was reacting to the way she was confronted.”
“She says that [Selena] came at her really aggressively,” says the family member. “She was so thrown off with how forceful Selena was being; everything happened so fast. If Selena had confronted her differently, this never would have happened.”
The convict — who is at the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Texas — has long maintained that she didn’t mean to kill Selena and that her death was accidental. She also claims that she planned to kill herself after the murder.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles confirms to The Post that they have begun the process of reviewing the case of Saldívar, now 64, who was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
The initial review began in October 2024, six months before Saldívar’s parole eligibility date of March 30. The arduous process included reviewing a case file, an interview with Saldívar, and letters submitted from Selena’s family.
The parole board will have a hearing at the end of the month and will then render their decision.
Saldívar has publicly claimed that she is a political prisoner who didn’t receive a fair trial. She has unsuccessfully appealed her conviction at least three times.
“I was convicted by public opinion even before my trial started,” Saldívar said in a prison interview for last year’s Peacock documentary: “Selena and Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them.”
Fellow inmates have told The Post that Saldívar is still kept away from the general population out of fear for her safety.
A former inmate, Yesenia Dominguez, told The Post last year that Saldívar was always a common subject of discussion in the prison yard.
“Everyone was always like, ‘Let me have five minutes with that b—h,’” Dominguez says.”Everyone wanted to get justice for Selena. There’s a target on her back.”
In 2018, Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla, told Univision’s Primer Impacto that other inmates had been threatening Saldívar’s life.
“To this day, we still receive letters from women who are in the same prison where they say they are waiting for her,” he said at the time. “They say that they are going to kill her. There are bad women in there. Women who have murdered other people in the past. That is why they are in there. They have nothing to lose.”
But now Saldivar wants out, and claims that she will live with relatives and find a job if she’s set free.
“She has a place to live,” says the family member. “We have never forsaken her. But I don’t know where she’s going to get a job. Who will hire her?”
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