Heartbreak and shock grip a family a neighbor allegedly killed their 22-year-old loved one over a seemingly trivial dispute at an Albuquerque apartment.
As she flips through a photo album filled with memories, Maria Rodriguez confronts the pain of losing her daughter. “She wasn’t just my daughter. She was my best friend,” Rodriguez said via KRQE News.
The grieving mother added her child was her “everything.”
At 22, Esmeralda Romero was building the future she dreamed of, working toward her goal of joining the Air Force. However, that future ended abruptly on July 20 at the Albuquerque Encore Apartments near Eubank and Lomas. Her mother remembers receiving a call from her daughter about a downstairs neighbor.
Romero told her mother that her neighbor had yelled at her in front of her young sisters. The confrontation stemmed from water from a dog bowl spilling onto his patio.
Rodriguez recalled that their conversation marked the last time she spoke with her daughter. “And then I got a phone call about 45 minutes later. That she was gone,” she said
Police said video shows the downstairs neighbor stabbing Romero to death outside the apartment’s leasing office. “It hurt, it hurt to know that somebody would want to hurt my daughter knowing how loving and how caring she was and how much she cared about people,” Rodriguez said.
Romero’s boyfriend of three years, Jonah Bejarano, recalls the moment he learned about her death. “In that moment I felt like such a big part of me was just ripped away,” he said.
A Legacy of Love and Faith
Romero’s loved ones are honoring her legacy of love as they hold on to the memories she left behind.
Bejarano described her as a very loving person. He said she was a woman “driven by her love and her faith in Jesus.”
“In the moments when I felt like I couldn’t keep going. She always reminded me, Mom. She said, We have Jesus on our side, so we’ll get through anything,” Rodriguez said.
Although the pain remains, Romero’s loved ones find comfort and joy in the memories they made with her. “I did ask her at one point, I said, why do you take everybody’s stuff? She’s like, because it reminds me of you guys and I always have a piece of you with me. I used to, used to annoy me so much, but now I just, I’d give anything for her to come and just steal another one of my shirts,” Rodriguez said.
The downstairs neighbor, Michael Cain, faces a murder charge in connection with Romero’s death. He remains in custody pending trial.
