Valentina Orellana Peralta was a smart girl with dreams of studying robotics in high school and college.
The 14-year-old from Santiago, Chile told her mother she wanted to build a robot to help her with chores around the house, her cousin Emily Carr said in a eulogy celebrating the teenager’s life on Monday, Jan. 10, at the City of Refuge Church in Gardena.
“Valentina was pensive and quiet,” Carr said. “She was always thoughtful, always thinking. She absorbed the world around her like a sponge.”
Carr spoke to a 100-strong audience, half of them media members, inside the church’s cavernous convention hall. Just in front of her, Orellana Peralta’s body lay in an open casket, her mother and father weeping while holding photos of their daughter.
The funeral for the Van Nuys girl — killed on Dec. 23, 2021, when a Los Angeles police officer fired a rifle at an assault suspect inside a North Hollywood Burlington store — drew intense media coverage and national civil rights figures as well.
Just before Carr spoke, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Ben Crump, an attorney for other victims of police violence including George Floyd’s family, led mourners in chants of “Justice for Valentina!” and “Valentina was innocent!”
Juan Pablo Orellana and Soledad Peralta, and other mourners, called again for charges to be brought against the LAPD officer who fired the bullet that struck and killed their daughter as she huddled inside the store’s dressing room that day.
“She always told me that this country was the safest place in the world,” her father said in Spanish in his eulogy. “Unfortunately, she was mistaken. She came to this country to face her death.”
LAPD Officer William Jones was one of several police officers who responded to Burlington that day after getting reports of a man attacking shoppers with a bike lock. Some calls came in suggesting the man, Daniel Elena Lopez, might have a gun. He did not.
LAPD released footage of the shooting showing Jones walking briskly through the store, then spotting a bloodied, injured woman on the ground. He turned the corner into an aisle and saw Lopez standing a short distance away holding the bike lock. Jones fired three times, killing Lopez and accidently fatally shooting the teen, unseen behind a wall where she was hiding with her mother.
LAPD officials have said the shooting is under investigation. California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office is also reviewing it, as required by state law governing certain police shootings.
Sharpton told the mourners he flew into Los Angeles from the East Coast to be with Orellana Peralta’s family and to call for justice. A longtime civil rights leader, he and Crump have been fixtures at demonstrations for people killed by police officers in the U.S. for years.
He said the races of the people involved — Orellana Peralta was a Latina, and Jones is a Black man — didn’t change his call for justice.
“I don’t feel better if I get shot by a Black cop,” Sharpton said, pointing his index finger at his chest.
Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti have both apologized for the shooting and offered condolences to Orellana-Peralta’s family. Neither would comment about discipline for Jones before the completion of the city’s administrative investigation and the attorney general’s review.
The Gardena church on welcomed in Orellana Peralta’s family members from multiple countries: Most are from Chile and Canada. They sat in the front rows with black sweatshirts emblazoned with the girl’s face, listening to lively gospel music and holding their hands up in praise.
As the ceremony ended, the family filed out behind Orellana Peralta’s casket to a waiting hearse. Her parents each held large photos of her. There, a reverend of Sharpton’s National Action Network, his longtime civil rights group, again led a prayer as he released doves that roost in Hacienda Heights and would return there.
As the hearse pulled away, a caravan of activists in their cars held signs with Orellana Peralta’s face out of their windows. The hearse and the family headed in a different direction, to Orellana Peralta’s burial site at an undisclosed location.