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player ready...Jury selection for the trial of a Cicero man accused of fatally shooting his 15-year-old ex-girlfriend outside her Romeoville home earlier this year is scheduled to begin Monday in Will County.
Erick M. Maya, 24, is charged with murder, attempted murder and felony aggravated battery in the Feb. 13 killing of Briana Valle.
Briana and her mother, Alicia Guerrero, were getting in their car at home in the 300 block of Emery Avenue and heading to Romeoville High School about 7 a.m. that day, according to officials.
Maya allegedly walked up to them in their driveway and fired several shots through the passenger window, striking Briana twice in the head and her mother once in her neck, according to authorities.
Briana died Feb. 17 and was pronounced dead at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood. Her mother survived the shooting.
Romeoville police said at the time that a handgun believed to have been used in the shooting was found in a nearby yard, near where police found Maya hiding after the incident.
A Tribune investigation conducted after Briana’s killing showed Guerrero’s nearly yearlong quest to keep her daughter away from Maya, who was her boyfriend at one point, according to court records.
The peace Guerrero sought proved elusive. Court records and interviews with law enforcement officials earlier this year revealed a series of clerical errors and faulty addresses that may have led to nearly a dozen failed attempts by Cook and Will county authorities to serve Maya with the orders of protection that Guerrero had been granted.
And some of these errors happened after Maya was convicted of domestic abuse, put on probation and ordered to wear an ankle monitor in a separate case, according to records.
A week before Briana was fatally wounded, a Cook County judge declined to issue an arrest warrant for Maya after he failed to appear in court for a Feb. 6 status hearing on an unrelated domestic abuse case. The judge, citing the frigid weather, let Maya’s absence slide but said he would issue the warrant if he didn’t appear at his next court date, Feb. 19.
“This could’ve been prevented,” Guerrero told the Tribune in a written statement earlier this year. “We are so angry and hurt.”
Briana met Maya on Facebook in June 2012, when she was 13 and her family lived in Chicago’s Little Village, Guerrero said in court records.
Briana and her mother moved to Romeoville last fall, and Valley View School District 365U officials said she entered the school system in October.
Guerrero did not respond to requests for comment last week.
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