Slain KC mom wanted ‘everything’ for her newborn. Family works to get baby home

In the baby book for her little boy Nicholas, born in late February, Yasmene Herrera had already briefly described the kind of life she wanted for her firstborn.

The new mom, who had big plans for taking her boy to the zoo and park, wrote that she wanted to go back to school and become a veterinarian. Her mother, Alicia Herrera-Aquino — who has read her daughter’s words in the book — said Yasmene’s hopes for her son were simple.

“She wanted to give the baby everything she could,” Herrera-Aquino said. “She wanted to be a great mom.”

But when Nicholas was just 18 days old, his mom was killed, shot to death on March 15 in what Kansas City police have said was a murder-suicide. Officers responding to a report of a shooting, found Herrera, 21, and Nicholas’ father, Victor Campos, 21, with gunshot wounds inside their apartment in the Northland.

One week after they lost Yasmene, several relatives sat down with The Star and described how domestic violence shattered their lives and snuffed out their brightest light. And now they are focused on the young mom’s newborn baby boy who came into the world Feb. 25.

“She was the heart of our family,” Paul Briones, Jr., Yasmene’s uncle, said of his niece. “And she didn’t even know it.”

Rita Aguirre said of her granddaughter: “She was just so lovable. She was good.”

‘She was robbed’

The Kansas City Police Department has publicly said very little about the suspected murder-suicide in the 2600 block of NE 42nd Street just before 4:30 a.m. on March 15. For more than a week, detectives also didn’t reach out to the young mother’s family, they said, leaving them with questions about what led to the shooting, where Herrera was when she was shot and how she died.

On Monday, after calling detectives for a third time, Herrera-Aquino said they heard from police. And her daughter, they were told, was shot in the head while it appears she was lying in bed.

“She was robbed,” Herrera’s mother said. “She was robbed from her life, and her son will never know what a beautiful mom he had, her soul, her laugh. Oh, my God, she was always laughing.”

Added Vincent “Mikey” Aquino, Herrera’s stepfather: “She was a beautiful old soul, loving, caring, and probably the most compassionate person I’ve ever had the opportunity to be around.”

The young woman known for a squeaky voice similar to Minnie Mouse left behind not only her weeks old son, but a large family with 15 siblings, many aunts and uncles, a father and stepfather and mother who many say was her best friend and constant companion.

She will be laid to rest on Friday. Relatives created a GoFundMe account to help pay for funeral expenses. Anything left over will go toward caring for Herrera’s newborn, the account said.

“Our lives are going to be all focused on Nicholas now,” Herrera-Aquino said. “How are we going to explain to this little boy where his mom and dad are, especially where his mom is?

“... She only had two weeks with her baby. Two weeks, that’s it.”

The night before

The last time Herrera’s mom and stepfather, Vincent “Mikey” Aquino, saw the young mother — who family called Menes, pronounced Mee-nees — was the night before she died. She and Campos and Nicholas had come over for a family barbecue. One of her sisters, who also has a baby, came over, too.

The group took photos of the two babies and enjoyed the evening. Campos played video games and it was a good night.

Herrera, Campos and Nicholas were the last to leave.

“He wanted the baby to stay with us, and he kept telling her, ‘Babe, just leave the baby here with your mom and Mikey,’” Herrera-Aquino said. “He said it more than once, ‘Yeah, leave the baby, leave the baby with your mom.”

Herrera-Aquino and her husband remember walking the couple and their grandson to the door.

“Okay, Menes, I love you,’” Herrera-Aquino said. “And she said, ‘Mommy, I love you too. I’ll see you tomorrow.’”

Herrera’s brother, Anthony — the pair are two years apart and have always been close — was texting and talking with his sister that night. At 10:30, all communication stopped.

On Sunday morning, as Herrera-Aquino was listening to her church service, a daughter reached out and said police had reached out.

“Mom, the detectives are looking for me and you,” her daughter said. “Something to do with Yasmene.”

Before long, her daughter called back and suggested her mom just go and check on her sister.

“I make it to her apartments and there’s yellow tape,” Herrera-Aquino said. “I got halfway to the door and they pulled me back and they were like, ‘You can’t go in there.’

“I said, ‘What happened? What’s going on?’ They were like, ‘It was a murder-suicide.’”

‘Beginning to start her life’

The family replays in their minds that night before their lives changed forever. They search for any clue of what may have gone wrong.

“I’m still like, ‘What happened?’” Herrera Aquino said. “What happened in between that time? What was going on? Did I miss something? Did she tell me something and I didn’t hear it?”

Herrera-Aquino sensed during the relationship that “something was off.” She said he wouldn’t “let her go to the bathroom by herself” or let her go see family alone. He was “always there.”

“He even got to where he was trying to keep me and her apart,” Herrera’s mom said. “We were close, just really close, every day, talking, texting, and he kept, like, trying to keep her away from me.”

At this point, nothing makes sense, she and other family members said.

“This should never have had happened,” said Debbie Briones, Herrera’s aunt and Paul’s wife, as she looked down at the ground in disbelief.

In Briones’ kitchen, relatives talked about domestic violence and what their niece and daughter and granddaughter may have faced. They said they are only left to wonder now.

“She could have been embarrassed. … She could have been, ‘I don’t want my mom to know,’” Herrera-Aquino said. “She was real big on me knowing things. She could have been in that situation.

“First real relationship. First boyfriend. First apartment. First baby. And gone.”

“She was just beginning to start her life,” said Aquino, Herrera’s stepfather.

They were both so young, Paul Briones said, that “domestic violence didn’t cross your mind.” What they said they did see is that Campos could try to be controlling and possessive.

“When you think of domestic violence you think of older people,” Paul Briones said, “In this case, it was quick.”

But domestic violence, he said, “doesn’t have a color or an age. It doesn’t include money, no money.”

“It’s almost like how they say when you shoot a gun, that bullet doesn’t have a name on it. Domestic violence is a bullet coming out of a gun, in so many different ways, it don’t have a name on it.”

It can impact anyone, he said.

“There are so many ways we failed her,” Briones said. “As an uncle, as a mom, as an aunt, as a grandma, as a brother or sister. Maybe there were signs that were there that we didn’t see that we should have.”

Herrera-Aquino said just days before her daughter was killed, the young mother told her that she was “gonna ride the apartment out to November,” and then “I’m gonna leave.”

“She said, ‘Then we’ll go our separate ways, Mommy.”

Understanding the loss

Relatives throughout the family are struggling with the loss of Yasmene, who in the birth order of the children was in the middle.

When Herrera was 9, her little brother Carmine Nicholas was born. Because her mom had complications during the birth, the little girl stepped up to help.

She doted on him and the bond between the sister and brother — who is diagnosed with autism — became undeniable, relatives said.

As the years went on, family say Herrera was always there for Carmine. She went to doctors’ appointments with her mom, listened to what professionals had to say.

“She did online schooling with him,” Aquino said of his stepdaughter. “She would put him online and sit there with the teacher.”

For everything, she was there.

“She tells everybody, ‘I raised him,’” Herrera-Aquino said, a smile crossing her face.

And when Herrera was pregnant, she told her mom: “I’m gonna name him Nicholas — after my son.”

When Herrera was killed, her mother knew she needed help telling Carmine — who is now 12 years old and nonverbal — what had happened and what it all meant. She made an appointment with his behavioral health professional.

“She went through the steps to tell him,” Herrera-Aquino said. “He sat there and he listened. She was talking to him in a voice, and she was like, ‘Yasmene will never come back. You will never see Yasmene again — she died.’

“I just started crying,” Herrera-Aquino said, “because I’m thinking, ‘He can’t process that, he’s not going to know.’”

She just kept thinking of his routine and how his big sister was a large part of that. Herrera-Aquino worried that her son would notice she was gone and not know why.

“She was every day in our lives,” Herrera-Aquino said. “There was not a day he didn’t probably see her.”

At the appointment, Carmine’s mother was warned that he may become angry and start acting out at some point. As she left the appointment, she was unsure of what to expect next.

Then in the car, her son hit the door and she heard him say, ‘Died.’

“And I just was like, ‘He knows,’” Herrera-Aquino said. “‘He knows.’”

A few days after the appointment she watched as her son focused on pictures of his sister hanging in the house.

“He just went to one picture, stared at it, and went to another picture and looked at it,” Herrera-Aquino said. “He played back and forth with it and he just looked at her.”

That’s become his everyday world, she said. His routine.

All about Nicholas

For now, Herrera’s newborn son — named after Carmine — is in foster care. Her mother and stepfather have already gone to court and started the process to adopt him.

But that can take time.

Until then, the foster parents are in regular contact and send photos and update them on little Nicholas. And Herrera’s family has given them pictures of his mom.

“I text her all of the time,” Herrera-Aquino said of the foster mother. “I texted her last night to tell him good night. And she tells me, ‘I’ve given all the hugs and kisses you were telling me to give him.’”

In one text, Herrera-Aquino said she apologized to the foster mom for reaching out so early.

“(But) watching the sun rise reminds me of Yasmene coming through,” she said. “And I said, ‘I just want to hold Nicholas and I just want to tell him about his mom.”

The kindness of the foster parents has been “amazing,” Aquino said, who described them as “very nice people.”

He and Herrera’s mother met them at Starbucks last week and were able to take turns holding their grandson for about an hour. The entire family — all the siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins — are waiting to see and hold him.

“I think everybody’s biggest need right now, is getting him home so they can help,” Herrera-Aquino said. “And (there) can be some peace within us to know that that’s a part of Yasmene. We didn’t even have him long, we don’t even have him to be here to comfort the family, or, you know, for us to comfort him.”

They all already know the little boy will grow up constantly being told about the young woman with the big laugh and even larger personality, who would sooner buy her siblings a gift than spend money on herself.

“Nicholas, he will know about his mom, that’s the easy part,” said Briones. “The hard part will be to answer all the questions he has. And to make sure we are living up to her standards.”

These days they pray for strength and healing. And that’s one thing, Herrera’s mom said she hopes others can do for them as she learns to live each day without her daughter.

“Pray for us, that’s all we ask,” she said. “Pray for our family that we get healing. Pray for us that we get Nicholas home.”

Laura Bauer

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4944

Laura Bauer, who came to The Kansas City Star in 2005, focuses on investigative and watchdog journalism. In her 30-year career, Laura has won numerous national awards for coverage of human trafficking, child welfare, crime and government secrecy.