What happened to Amanda
Amanda was sixteen. On June 29, 1994 she was helping out at her mother's jewelry store when a man named Eugenio C. Quijano, Jr. came in. He had been parked outside for hours that morning, waiting.
He asked her to show him some jewelry. When she reached into the case to get it, he shot her in the back of the head.
He pulled her into the back offices and went out front to start clearing the showcases. The owner of the shop next door walked in, saw what was happening, and screamed. Quijano ran. He left behind every piece of jewelry and all of the cash he had come for. Amanda died the following day, June 30, 1994.
His family helped him stay ahead of the police, and the gun was destroyed. It took eleven months, but Sgt. Eddie Herman found him. When officers arrived with a search warrant, Quijano was hiding under his bed.
He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. That sounds like the end of it, and for a long time we let ourselves believe it was. It isn't. He comes up for parole, and every time he does, we have to make the case all over again that he should stay exactly where he is.
We are not going to try to sum Amanda up in a paragraph. She was sixteen, she was loved, and she had every reason to expect a long life. The photos below do a better job of showing who she was than anything we could write.