Chris Pérez Discusses Selena’s Death in New E! Documentary, ‘Death of Innocence’

via YouTube

A new documentary on Selena Quintanilla’s death appeared on E! Entertainment television on Monday night. The documentary, called “True Hollywood Story: Death of Innocence”, takes a true-crime approach to Selena Quintanilla‘s death at the hands of Yolanda Saldívar.

“Death of Innocence” featured interviews Selena’s close family and friends about the circumstances that led up to her tragic death.

The “Death of Innocence” series is meant to explore the “lives and legacies” or superstars whose lives were negatively impacted by obsessed fans who were “convinced they shared an intimate bond”. The “Death of Innocence” series will also have episodes devoted to singer Christina Grimmie and actress Rebecca Schaeffer.

This isn’t the first E! True Hollywood story dedicated to the Queen of Tejano music. In 1996, the celebrity news network aired a documentary called “The Selena Murder Trial” that focused on the aftermath of Selena’s death.

“Death of Innocence” featured an in-depth and wide-ranging interview with Selena’s widower, Chris Pérez.

In “Death of Innocence”, Pérez detailed the trauma that he experienced because of Selena’s death. “It was traumatic, it was the hardest thing up until that point that I had ever had to go through,” Pérez, who was 25 at the time of Selena’s death, explained.

He went on to describe how he still experiences grief due to the loss of his wife. “I [still] miss her face, her laughter. She was just an amazing soul, an amazing spirit,” he said.

He also revealed how his short time with Selena changed his life forever. “She taught me a lot,” he said. “I used to never tell people I love them, you know? Or I miss them, or just give them gifts just because. I learned those things and many, many other things from her.”

Chris Pérez also explained that he has bared the brunt of fans’ grief and anger over the tragic way that Selena was taken from this earth.

“I heard fans that are like, ‘How could we let that happen?'” he revealed in “Death of Innocence”. “Come on now, you think that I would let anything happen to her, like seriously? None of us thought that [losing her] was even a possibility.”

He went on to explain that Selena’s loved ones believed they had done everything they could to keep her safe. “On the road, we had security so I never really feared for her safety,” he said. “You know, especially the way it happened to her. The fact that one of her friends did that, it’s just unbelievable.”

But as Martin Gomez, Selena’s designer, explained in the documentary, “evil can creep up into your home, and you don’t know that evil is there.”

The film also touched on the excitement that Selena had about releasing her upcoming English-language album.

As “Death of Innocence” explained, while Selena was a superstar in the American Spanish-speaking community, she wasn’t a mainstream star yet. But those around her had high hopes for her.

“Doing the English record, that was always the next big goal for her,” Pérez said. And after her death, it “felt like we had to finish it.” But completing the album when Selena wasn’t there was a painful struggle for her widower.

“Them pushing play for me to record the guitar tracks and to hear her voice coming out the speakers in the studio, it was just painful to go in [the recording booth] and have to create parts and make them sound a certain way, when really inside you’re just dying,” he explained