When they were 12 years old, they met at a fishing spot in Holyoke and instantly hit it off. According to Monica Sanchez, she met her first love again using a dating app in 2018. Together, they intended to make a life. On Monday, however, she watched helplessly as Victor Nieves attempted murder the Springfield family living below them before turning the gun on himself.
To paraphrase, “He adored those youngsters. For them, he’d sacrifice everything. Sanchez claimed her partner would not have opened fire on a group of people that afternoon had he been thinking clearly. The couple lived on the second floor of 174 Berkshire Ave.
She claimed that Nieves had been abusing cocaine and other narcotics. According to Sanchez, he started acting very strangely that afternoon. He warned her that assailants were waiting for him outside. However, nobody seemed to be around.
Sanchez said that shortly after 2:30 p.m., Nieves ran downstairs and shot the grandmother in the head, as well as two of the three children and the family dog. According to law authorities, he eventually turned the pistol on himself.
The tweet below verifies the news:
Monica Sanchez, the live-in girlfriend of Monday’s murder-suicide shooter, said Nieves had been using cocaine before he shot three members of the family who lived downstairs, one fatally. https://t.co/VwQPU28wgw
— masslivenews (@masslivenews) August 16, 2023
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Sanchez admitted that the gun belonged to her. She claimed she has a license to carry firearms and attempted to keep at least three from Nieves’s view. When interviewed on Tuesday, she had just finished cleaning up the Pine Point apartment they had shared. “I don’t know how he found that one gun,” she claimed.
Grandmother Kim Fairbanks, 52, was reportedly the first victim of Nieves’s. Two of the three children were struck by his gunfire. A spokesman for the Springfield Police Department stated Tuesday that a 12-year-old girl who had been wounded in the abdomen was in stable condition at Baystate Medical Center.
Her younger sister, who was only 10, had been shot in the chest and was in critical condition in a Boston hospital. Their younger sibling, aged 5, was unharmed in the incident. The police arrived to find a bloody scene outside the apartment’s entrance and several terrified children cowering in a bedroom.
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Sanchez claimed that she had phoned Nieves’s mother not long before to inform her of her daughter’s erratic behavior and subsequent descent to the basement. Sanchez reported that the children’s mother had told her she would be calling Fairbanks, the mother of the children’s father.
Then, “I heard gunshots and ran outside,” Sanchez claimed. Her cries for aid were heard by the neighbors. Police say one of the kids made a 911 call from inside the residence. Detectors showed up shortly afterward.
“The oldest girl, when she came out with blood all over her, she said: ‘Victor shot us, and he shot himself.’ So I ran back inside and saw him on the floor, and I just fell down,” Sanchez said.
Police say that Nieves, 34, had a little criminal history that did not contain any violent offenses. Sanchez claims there was little discussion about the past between them. The future, however, was a topic of conversation. They had discussed relocating to central Massachusetts the day before the shooting, she added.
Nieves was now unemployed. Sanchez claims that before his violent rampage on Monday, he was a peaceful person. “People are saying all kinds of bad stuff about him. But he wasn’t that person. He was a very kind person,” Sanchez said.
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