Yolanda Saldívar, the woman serving a life sentence for the 1995 murder of Tejano icon Selena Quintanilla-Perez, has doubled down on her claim the shooting was accidental — and argues she should be released from prison.
Saldívar, now 62, hopes to be freed when she’s eligible for parole in March 2025.
“Enough is enough,” a Saldívar relative tells The Post. “She feels like she’s a political prisoner at this point. She’s ready to get out of jail, because she believes she has more than served her time.”
Saldívar herself made a similar claim in a “Selena and Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them,” a documentary which premiered last week on Oxygen and is now streaming on Peacock.
“I was convicted by public opinion even before my trial started,” she said in a prison interview, before insisting that she did not intend to kill the 23-year-old star.
Saldívar — a founder of Selena’s fan club — has been behind bars since March 31, 1995, when she gunned down the singer during a confrontation at a Corpus Christi, Texas, hotel. Selena believed Saldívar had embezzled more than $60,000 and was planning to fire her.
During their encounter, Saldívar shot the “Queen of Tejano” in the back. The singer died from blood loss at a hospital later that day.
At trial, attorneys for Saldívar claimed that the shooting was accidental and she had meant to kill herself. But a jury disagreed, and sentenced her to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
Now, Saldívar claims that she didn’t even embezzle the money. While she acknowledged in the documentary she wrote and signed checks to herself, she insisted she did so at Selena’s request to purchase plane tickets for the singer to visit a plastic surgeon in Mexico, with whom she was allegedly having an affair.
A spokesperson for Selena’s family did not return The Post’s request for a comment, but Selena’s father has previously denied many of Saldívar’s assertions and called her a liar.
The Post has obtained detailed records of Saldívar’s incarceration at Mountain View Unit, a maximum-security women’s prison in Gatesville, Texas.
Saldivar has filed complaints with the jail — and even a federal lawsuit in 2017 claiming that her living conditions were “unsafe and dangerous” after she injured herself by falling off the top bunk.
The Post has learned Saldívar plans to cite her safety fears as one of the justifications for release when she’s up for parole next year.
A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice tells The Post that Saldívar has no blemishes on her record that would keep the board from holding a parole hearing. She can formally request a hearing up to 90 days prior to her eligibility date.
“She knows it’s an uphill battle,” her relative acknowledges, “but she’s hoping that the parole board will have a heart and will parole her. She thinks she deserves it.”
