Yessenia Sanchez appears in a November 2022 Miami-Dade County mugshot.
A former school cop in Florida confessed on camera to shooting her estranged boyfriend — himself a Miami-Dade Police Officer — after “she actively tracked the victim via electronic means.” That’s according to a police report detailing the Friday morning incident that was subsequently obtained by Miami ABC affiliate WPLG.
The police report adds that a “closed-circuit television camera” — perhaps a home security system — “captured the incident in its entirety” and that the victim was shot “in the head.”
According to Miami-Dade County jail records reviewed by Law&Crime on Saturday morning, Yessenia Sanchez, 32, is charged with first-degree attempted murder with a deadly weapon and is being held without bond. She’s also charged with aggravated stalking. Plus, she faces a separate case involving one count of leaving the scene of an accident involving property damage.
Hialeah Police Sgt. Jose Torres said Friday that the victim of the attack — elsewhere identified as Damian Colon — was in “extremely” critical condition. The Miami Herald reported early Saturday that Colon was “clinging to life.” The most recent update from the Miami-Dade Police Department, which was issued late Friday, indicated that the victim “is out of surgery and is listed in critical but stable condition.”
A positive update about @MiamiDadePD officer Damian Colon, a 17-year veteran of the department, who was shot in the head by an ex this morning in Hialeah. @WPLGLocal10 https://t.co/kB26jfkWnE https://t.co/ztyCgfVdtg pic.twitter.com/3eFIiwDxZv
— Ian Margol (@IanMargolWPLG) November 4, 2022
A plethora of local newsrooms identified Colon, a 17-year veteran of the Miami-Dade force, as the person shot. The authorities said he was off duty, as Law&Crime noted Friday, and local news reports indicated he was at his parents’ house when he was shot.
The Hialeah Police Department is taking the lead on the case because it happened in its jurisdiction. Hialeah is a city immediately northwest of downtown Miami and is part of the latter city’s megalopolis.
Documents from the Hialeah Police Department say its officers responded to the 1200 block of West 79 Street for a report of a “female armed with a firearm” at 6:37 a.m. Friday.
When officers arrived, they didn’t find the female subject in question, but they did find the victim “lying supine on the porch . . . with an apparent gunshot wound to the head.” The victim was airlifted to the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, the police report says.
An investigation revealed that the victim and the defendant “were in a romantic relationship for the past seven (7) years,” the report adds.
It says Sanchez “was tracking the victim via an electronic application” on Friday “and located the victim at the incident location.”
“Upon locating the victim at his residence, the defendant exited her getaway vehicle with her firearm holstered in an exterior holster,” the report continues. “At that point, both parties began to argue, at which point the defendant fired a single shot, striking the victim on the head.”
The police report says the “victim fled the scene” after the shooting, but that may be a mistake because the report elsewhere says the victim was found at the scene. (It was the suspect, not the victim, who fled, another police report states.)
An investigation revealed that the defendant “sent the victim global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of his whereabouts prior to the incident” in an attempt to “unlawfully . . . locate the victim,” the police report goes on.
“After identifying the defendant via surveillance video from the area, the defendant was located and arrested,” the police report continues. “Post-Miranda per form, the defendant waived her rights and provided a post-Miranda video recorded statement confessing to shooting the victim. Moreover, the defendant advised she actively tracked the victim via electronic means in an attempt to locate the victim. The defendant was charged accordingly and transported to jail.”
Yessenia Sanchez appears in an earlier Miami-Dade County mugshot.
A second police report explains what allegedly happened between the time Sanchez allegedly left the scene and when she was ultimately caught.
That subsequent report says Sanchez was involved in a “hit and run crash” at 58 East 45 Street. The victim of that crash said she was driving west on East 45 Street and was approaching Palm Avenue when a red pickup truck came around the corner, entered her lane, and sideswiped her vehicle.
Sanchez, according to the police, was in the red truck. She went on to slam into two other parked cars before “her vehicle gave out” down the street, the subsequent police report states.
The victim of the alleged hit-and-run approached Sanchez and ask her what she was doing, the second document goes on. It says Sanchez fled on foot without exchanging the usual contact information but dropped her wallet in, which contained her identification, in the process.
The police arrested Sanchez at her house, and the hit-and-run victim identified Sanchez in a photo lineup as the person who sideswiped her vehicle, the report concludes.
Sanchez is no stranger to law enforcement. Law&Crime noted Friday that she reportedly resigned her job as a school police officer after a domestic violence incident in 2021. During that incident, she allegedly attacked an individual described as her police officer boyfriend and pointed a gun at her own head in the process. She also allegedly flattened the tires of her boyfriend’s personal and department-issued vehicles. The upshot of that case is unclear.
The attempted murder charges are proceeding under case number F-22-020314 in Miami-Dade County, according to jail and court records. The charge of leaving the scene of an accident appears to be proceeding under a separate case number. No court documents have been filed in the attempted murder case as of Saturday morning.
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