Support for Colina Family After Tragic Loss

A police report describes 17-year-old Yeremi Colina as the victim of a deadly stabbing this month. His mother long had another way of describing him: "leader of the pack."

Yeremi was the oldest of six siblings and the reason, his mother Beritza Colina said, they were all able to make the arduous journey from their native Venezuela to the United States last year.

“It took us almost six months,” she recalled in Spanish in an interview on Friday. “In every country, we worked. Either Yeremi or I would do whatever we could. … We sold things in the streets. We slept in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk.”

The family spent six days crossing the treacherous Darien Gap, and Beritza was pregnant at the time, she said. On one occasion, she said, Yeremi saved his then-9-year-old brother from drowning in a river.

“God gave him the strength,” she said of her oldest son. “Things happened to us in the jungle that we still don’t talk about.”

On Dec. 4, 2023, the family members reached Texas, were bused to New York City, and were given two rooms at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, which has been serving as a migrant intake center since the spring of last year. But a year and a day later, police say, Yeremi was stabbed to death on a street in Lower Manhattan.