Shawna Forde

  

As she lay on the floor seemingly unconscious, Gina Gonzalez heard more people enter the home speaking in Spanish, ransacking the house, haphazardly taking her jewelry and anything else of value they could find. Whatever they were primarily looking for, it was clear they didn't find it. Then the nightmare took a turn for the worse.

Brisenia Flores, 9, the youngest daughter of Raul Flores and Gonzalez, had been sleeping through the commotion. Their older daughter Alexandra was spending the night at her grandparents' house. Brisenia had wanted to sleep with her new puppy beside her, but Gonzalez hadn't wanted the dog shedding in her daughter's bed so she had let them sleep on the living room couch. Brisenia, now awakened by the tumult and gunshots, asked the tall man, "Why did you shoot my dad?" "Everything's going to be okay," replied the tall man, "Nobody's going to hurt you." And then he went about reloading his weapon.

"Please don't shoot me!" the young girl pleaded. The man fired two bullets into Brisenia Flores. She would never speak again.

As soon as the intruders left her home, Gina Gonzalez crawled over to her wounded daughter Brisenia. "She was shaking," Gonzalez later told a jury, "I was telling her not to die on me, but she was choking on her own blood."

Gonzalez reached for a phone to call 911, and then made her way to the kitchen to retrieve the handgun her husband kept there. "They shot my husband, and they shot my daughter, and they shot me," she exclaimed to the 911 operator.

Just then the female intruder came back into the house and saw Gonzalez was alive. "She looked at me as if she'd seen a ghost," Gonzalez later recalled. The female intruder called out for the gunman to return, but this time Gonzalez was ready.

Audible on the 911 tape is the shootout that followed: gunshots aimed at Gonzalez ping off kitchen appliances. Gonzalez fires back, cursing at the gunman, and yelling at them to leave. When Gonzalez wounded her attacker, the invaders were forced to drive off.

When authorities arrived, Raul Flores and his daughter Brisenia were dead. A medical examiner would find Flores had been killed by six gunshots. Brisenia suffered two gunshots to the head — burns around the edges of her wounds proving the gun was fired at point-blank range. Gonzalez was brought to the University Medical Center in Tucson for treatment.