I worked at Telemundo TV Network before going into full time ministry, and had the privilege of videotaping Selena and her band, The Dinos, about 5 or 6 times in the 90’s.
We had the top rated TexMex show called, “Padrisimo” which Selena frequented.
Her brother AB, her sister Suzette, and her group, were a pleasure to work with. They were fun, relaxed and unpretentious.
Selena and her family, the Quintanillas, were Jehovah Witnesses. She later got married to Chris Perez, the group’s guitarist.
Selena was a “pizzaholic”. After our video shoots Telemundo would buy tons of pizza for the band.
At her last occasion in Telemundo, she sprinted up to the control room after the shoot where I was putting away the tapes, in a mad dash for pizza.
I was the only one there.
God told me to talk to her. The fear of man gripped me; or better to say, the fear of talking to an international star. I disobeyed God, and stayed away. This was to be my last encounter with Selena; one of her inhaling the pizza.
One month later, almost to the date, Yolanda Saldivar, one of Selena’s managers’ murdered her at a Holiday Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas. She shot her in the back. Selena ran across the pool of the Holiday Inn in panic. She bled to death. My understanding was that if she would have been able to lie down she would have made it.
That tragic lesson helped to free me from the fear or man and realized that when God tells you to do something, you MUST do it, and do it the first time. “Failing to obey quickly”, says Smith Wigglesworth “is disobedience.”
As for Selena, in the midst of international stardom, and in her early twenties, she was tragically taken from us. The producer of the show, a friend of hers, was devastated by the incident. Her family, so closely knit was shattered.
We spent the following week at Telemundo working overtime to produce shows of the authentic eerie police audio tapes from the red truck where Yolanda Saldivar barricaded herself. A police mediator by the name of Larry coaxed Yolanda to turn herself in.
Yolanda blamed a lot of her actions to Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla. Human nature is sadly so funny.
We don’t know the day or the hour of our departure from this earthly realm to meet the Living God.
Jesus says, today is the day of salvation. Don’t mess around with your eternity. He is the only way to eternal life.
Another great, Philip Seymour Hoffman, left us yesterday, so suddenly.
It’s a tragic lesson that on my last time with Selena, she taught me, and taught me well.
Selena, as with many others, changed my life.
The You Tube Video link below was her last time at Telemundo. I was the video tape operator on all these clips and part editor.
I realize from the date of the video shooting that she was murdered twenty-three days later on Friday, March 31st, 1995.
Jose and Mary Alvarez 