Young Woman Left Dead Under the Christmas Tree

The deceased was Aline Maiara Gomes da Silva, aged 19 at the time of her death on Christmas Eve, 2011. She was sitting on the porch of her humble flat in Bairro Centenário, Caruaru enjoying a beverage when a young man approached her at a rapid pace. According to witnesses he was on foot and openly carrying a handgun. The neighbors split, as is typically wise in the favelas, and young Aline attempted to do the same when she saw the gunman approaching her.

According to my main source, she got to her feet and tried to run into her home to hide, but had barely made it a single meter when she was shot twice in the back and once in the arm. Both center-mass bullets penetrated her lungs, likely flooding the pleural space with blood and likely resulting in a sadly prolonged death as she essentially drowned on her own vital fluids. The assailant fled and by the time police arrived (called by the neighbors when they went to hide in their own homes), Aline had died alone beneath her meager Christmas tree.

The police apprehended the killer the following day and reported that he was a 17 year old who had escaped from a juvenile detention center. He specifically sought out the 19 year old victim because he had been informed that the girl's aunt had murdered his grandfather 10 years earlier. This story was not verified by the police and it is assumed that someone set the dumb kid up to do a hit by spinning a false narrative about his grandfather's murder. The real reasons for her death (if there were any) are unknown.

I read a couple of conflicting articles on this case, all in Portuguese, about whether she was shot in the back or the chest. One said he shot her in the back while she was running away and the other said she was on her knees facing him and begging for her life (as reported by a neighbor) and she was shot twice in the chest. I don't know which is accurate. Her position certainly looks like she died while running into her home, but the chest wounds are much higher than the back wounds, so unless he was shooting her from a crouched position on the porch as she ran, I am inclined to think that she was shot in the chest, while down on her knees with him standing above her. One of the images also shows a shell casing lying right next to her body, which might also corroborate the idea that he shot her inside the home while she was on her knees.