Slain Teen's Mom Tells How Man Made Family's Life Nightmare Before Gunning Down Daughter

High School freshman Briana Valle had finally abandoned her romance with a much older Cicero man and was a day away from a Valentine’s date with an appropriately aged boyfriend.

And then the man who’d made her family’s life a living hell appeared one day with a gun in his hand and killed her, the slain teen’s mother said.

Alicia Guerrero wept throughout her testimony Friday at the murder trial of 24-year-old Erick Maya.

Maya slunk up on Briana, 15, and her mother as Guerrero was about to drive her to school on Feb. 13. Guerrero recalled how Maya pumped bullets through the window of her car.

“I heard a pop, and then I remember thinking someone knocked on my window so hard and I was so angry,” she said.

But then Briana slumped down and Guerrero knew something much more terrible had happened. She said she grabbed her daughter and pulled her lower, and then saw the gunman standing outside, “fiddling” with his revolver.

“I was just holding her there and saying, ‘Please stop. Please don’t do this,’” and then, “He shot me.”

Guerrero was hit in the neck. The bullet could not be removed and is still lodged in her body.

“I saw blood gushing out of me and I thought I was going to die and nobody was going to find my daughter, so I pushed the horn,” she said.

Guerrero also set off her car alarm and screamed for help, and neighbors came to her assistance. The police captured Maya about an hour later. He was hiding beneath yard waste bags in a nearby backyard. Maya had taken a cab down to Briana’s block from his Cicero home that morning.

Briana and Maya met through Facebook when she was 13, Guerrero said. Briana ran off with him in August 2012 and was only returned after Guerrero launched a diligent and exhaustive search. But even after she was back—and ostensibly cut off from Maya—she maintained contact with him, Guerrero said. And he lavished her with gifts, including balloons, an engagement ring and a mawkish Valentine’s card in which Maya professed his undying love for the then 14-year-old.

“I want to spend my life with you,” Guerrero read from the card while on the witness stand. “Erick and Briana forever.”

Briana and Maya’s mutual obsession prompted her family to move from Little Village to Romeoville. Briana transferred from an all-girls Catholic school to Romeoville High and began dating a boyfriend closer to her own age. She also sold Maya’s engagement ring at a cash-for-gold place in Joliet, Guerrero said.

But Maya would not go away, Guerrero said. Believing he got Briana pregnant and that her mother forced her to have an abortion, he telephoned Guerrero and called her a baby-killer, she said. Guerrero said her daughter was never pregnant in the first place.

And the day before Valentine’s—and Briana’s date with new boyfriend “Tony”—Maya showed up with a revolver to kill the teenager he claimed to love, Guerrero said.

Briana lived long enough to make it up to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood. Guerrero, herself grievously wounded, was being treated at the same hospital. She told of the last time she saw her daughter alive.

“I grabbed her hand and said, ‘Mommy’s here, sweetie,’” Guerrero said, “and she squeezed my hand.”

Guerrero next looked on her daughter at the funeral.

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