After a night of dancing and laughter in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Kelly Crispin and her fiance, Omar Padilla Vélez, were driving back to his family’s home when they made a wrong turn off the popular Calle Cerra nightlife strip.
It was about 1:45 a.m. on Jan. 3. The side street that the South Philadelphia couple had turned onto, which they thought led to the highway, was nearly pitch-black. Then suddenly, Crispin said, roughly a dozen masked men carrying AR-15-style rifles appeared in the road and quickly surrounded the car.
Padilla Vélez tried to press forward and drive around the crew, she said, when the men opened fire. She remembers the glass exploding around her and the pain in her shoulder and hand as bullets tore through the car. And then the words from her fiance: “I’ve been shot.”
Padilla Vélez, a 33-year-old chemist for DuPont, was shot in the head. He was rushed to a hospital, where he died days later.
Crispin, 31, recounted the attack in a phone interview from her South Philadelphia home this week as she struggled to come to terms with what she said San Juan police believe was a random attack by a gang controlling a small stretch of road near a popular tourist area.
After the shooting stopped, at the intersection of Calle Blanca and Calle La Nueva Palma, Crispin said, one of the men appeared at the side of the car and took her phone as she was calling 911.
She said she heard some of the men yelling at one another that there was a woman in the car and urging others not to shoot, as if realizing they had made a mistake. They searched her purse, she said, but returned her phone. They took nothing.
Crispin and a friend, who was with them in the car and was unharmed, pulled Padilla Vélez into the back seat. As she held pressure on his wounds, her friend took the wheel, and the gunmen told them to leave and told them how to get out of the neighborhood.
It was surreal, she said, to be shot and then have one of the gunmen explain how to leave safely.
They called 911 again as they left, and met an ambulance at a nearby gas station and were rushed to Centro Médico de Puerto Rico.
About two days later, Padilla Vélez was briefly stable enough for Crispin to visit him.
“He told me that he loved me, and I told him that I loved him, too,” she said. “And he said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Then he fell asleep.”
Later that day, she said, he suffered a catastrophic stroke. Days later, he was declared brain-dead. He was an organ donor, she said, and doctors were able to use his organs to save several lives.
Padilla Vélez was Puerto Rican, she said, and came to the mainland U.S. in 2015 to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry at Cornell University. He moved to Philadelphia in 2022 and worked as a senior scientist for DuPont in Wilmington.
The couple met about three years ago at their best friends’ wedding. Crispin, who works as a project manager for an electrical vehicle company, moved to Philadelphia about a year into their relationship. In September, they got engaged.
They often returned to San Juan to visit Padilla Vélez’s relatives. This trip, which began Dec. 30, was meant to ring in the new year.
Crispin said she has been frustrated with San Juan police, who she said did not appear to have visited the scene of the shooting until five days later, after her fiance died and the case was assigned to a homicide detective. She said she was not interviewed until Jan. 21 and worries those delays could hamper the investigation.
No arrests have been made.
Police in San Juan did not respond to several requests for comment about the case.
Crispin said the homicide detective assigned to the investigation told her that residents in the area, fearful of retaliation, have refused to provide information. Police, she said, told her that a gang operates on the street where they were ambushed, and that she and her fiance were likely shot in a case of mistaken identity.
Crispin said the city should warn people to avoid the area, especially since it’s so close to a popular tourist district.
Since returning to Philadelphia last week, she has struggled to make sense of her new reality. The bones in her hand were shattered and will require multiple surgeries to repair. The bullet passed through her shoulder, and she will need months of physical therapy.
But that is nothing, she said, compared to the searing heartache of what she has lost.
Padilla Vélez, she said, was intelligent and funny. To meet him was to feel like you’d known him for years.
He had a booming laugh that was often the loudest in the room.
“I thought it was mortifying at first, how loud it was,” she said. “Then I just began to love it.”
She recalled sitting with him on their couch one night and laughing so hard that their stomachs ached. She can’t remember what started the laughing fits, she said, but she remembers thinking: I am so lucky.
“I would see other couples and wonder if they laugh like Omar and I do,” she said.
“We had just made this decision to spend the rest of our lives together, forever,” she said. “It just feels so cruel that this was taken away.”
