The family of slain 15-year-old Mina Kurdian revealed she had recently ended a relationship with the 20-year-old man now accused of killing her in her Arcadia home.
Mina, 15, was showering when Paul Anthony Cruz Jr., 20, allegedly broke into her family’s house, entered the bathroom and shot her in the head, her grandfather Nick Eftekhari told the California Post. Officials pronounced the teen dead at the scene last Thursday.
Eftekhari said his granddaughter broke up with Cruz several weeks before the alleged murder. Cruz wanted to reconcile, but became upset when they could not patch things up, the grandfather added.
“I would’ve stopped it earlier,” Eftekhari said.
The grandfather estimated the pair had dated for a few months. He suggested he had not approved of the relationship and the five-year age gap between the adult and juvenile, but said he was unaware of it until recently.
Eftekhari described Mina as a “beautiful girl inside and outside.”
Authorities said Cruz fled the Arcadia home after the shooting. He was later found in a Petco parking lot in Pasadena with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. As of Friday morning, Cruz remained hospitalized in critical condition.
Neighbors told ABC 7 that Mina had a younger sister and that her relationship with her boyfriend had appeared fine from the outside.
“Her mother is a wonderful lady, you know, she works hard for her two kids and she has a younger sister,” one neighbor said. “They seemed to get along well with her boyfriend, you know, they got along so well and we saw them all the time… he was very polite. You never know. You never know who you’re with.”
The neighbor’s account of Cruz’s polite demeanor stood in sharp contrast to the violence police allege unfolded inside the family’s bathroom. Arcadia, an affluent Los Angeles suburb, sits at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains and is known for its large, well-kept homes and low crime rate.
Eftekhari’s disclosure that Mina had ended the relationship several weeks prior added a new dimension to the emerging portrait of the case, suggesting the alleged attack followed a rejected attempt at reconciliation rather than a spontaneous confrontation.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department continues to investigate Kurdian’s death. No charges had been publicly announced against Cruz as of Friday, with investigators awaiting his medical condition to stabilize.