A California mother of eight, who once suffered from drug abuse, was gunned down in the middle of the road by a group of teens she believed had sold one of her kids marijuana vape pens.
Maria Ramos, 33, was visiting her mother in Oakland when the two spotted a Toyota near her home suspected of selling the drug-infused e-cigarettes.
“Our plan was to tell them, stop coming to our house,” Bianca Velasco, Ramos’ mother said before things took a tragic turn.
Ramos and Velasco drove up to the Toyota sedan full of teens near the intersection of Hilton Street and Bancroft Avenue in Oakland on Aug. 7.
A street camera captured the moment Ramos hopped out of the passenger side of her mother’s Toyota RAV4 and began pepper-spraying into the teen’s sedan, according to video obtained by KTVU.
Two teens then jumped from the car, with one pulling out a gun and firing at Ramos.
The mother, who was visiting the Bay area from Los Angeles, is seen running to the other side of the street as the gunman turns to shoot Ramos’ mother, who fled the shooting.
The gunman got back into the blue sedan before it drove off.
Velasco returned to the scene to find her daughter lying motionless on the side of the road.
“I started rubbing her chest and telling her, ‘Breathe, Lupita, breathe! Like, we still need you. You have 8 kids.’ And she tried,” Velasco told the outlet.
“She was a cheerful person, a very lovable person to her and her kids. You know she was very lovable. She liked taking her kids out all the time. Her kids were her world to her,” Velasco said.
“She left her eight kids, and that’s really hard,” Ramos’ aunt, Carmen Beltran, told Fox 2.
Ramos, who kicked her own drug habit years ago, leaves behind seven daughters between the ages of 1 and 15 and a 7-year-old son.
Beltran blasted the teens’ choice of violence that resulted in her niece’s death, calling for a change to their lifestyle.
“They should change the way they live over here. We don’t have to be killing people for no reason, you know?” Beltran said. “There’s another way to fix the problem. You have some problem with somebody, you don’t have to shoot nobody.”
The suspected gunman, a 16-year-old boy, was later arrested and charged with murder.
He is being held at Alameda County Juvenile Hall, but his name was not released due to his age.
Isaiah Gomes, the suspected getaway driver, was charged as an accessory to the shooting by Almadea County prosecutors.
