DENVER — "My heart is broken. I don't think I'll ever be the same again," Jenni Granados Cortez said through tears as she remembered the last moments she spent with her little sister, 16-year-old Aaliyah Cortez.
"It's just a loop that plays over and over," Cortez said. "I want my sister back."
The two were on their way to their grandparent's house Wednesday evening when they were approached by a teenager with a gun in the Montbello neighborhood.
"They came running up to the car, put the gun to my head, and when I started saying, 'No! No! No!' I was having a panic attack. [I] stepped on the gas and my car wasn't moving [because of ice]," Cortez said.
She said Aaliyah was trying to fight off the suspect.
"I don't know if he shot to scare or shot to get her off of him because she was hitting him," she said.
Aaliyah was shot and later died at the hospital.
"I'm just going crazy. She didn’t deserve it, she didn’t," Cortez said.
The shooting happened on Atchison Way in the Montbello neighborhood around 6 p.m. Wednesday.After it happened, Cortez left the area and ended up in a nearby shopping center about a mile away. She said she tried to call 911 for help multiple times, but it was hard to get through.
"I waited two to three minutes on the phone before a dispatch got to me," she said. "I don’t know what I'm going do with my life. I'm losing my mind. This pain, I do not wish on my worst enemy."
Friday, police arrested a juvenile in connection to the shooting.
"We don't know too much about who it is. Pretty much all we know is that it was a minor, so details weren't able to get released to us," Aaliyah's mother, Wendy Cortez, said.
The family believes there was another suspect involved.
"I want to know who the other person is," Cortez said. "There were two people walking on the sidewalk."
The Cortez family is pleading for justice as they grapple with this immense heartache.
"I'm going to keep talking to her every day until I get a sign that she's with me because I know she can hear me, and I just want to tell her, 'I'm so sorry.' She shouldn’t have gotten up to fight him off," Cortez said. "I know she’ll be with me forever."
The family is asking for help with funds to cover Aaliyah's funeral. They've launched a GoFundMe page.
"We just got a call earlier today. So just for the plot alone is $11,000. So we had to bump our GoFundMe up," Wendy Cortez said.
Since the suspect is a juvenile, Denver police cannot release additional information, including his name or an arrest affidavit.
The Denver District Attorney's Office will make the final determination regarding charges.
The family is hosting a benefit between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 22 at The Spot 2.0, located at 8880 Washington in Thornton.
