Valeria Marquez spoke to her Tiktok -followers in a live stream of her beauty salon in Zapopan, Mexico, when someone arrived at her door to deliver a small package.
“He's a bit big!” The 23-year-old beauty effort called when she came back to her viewers and the hug turned out, smiling as she threw her long blonde hair over her shoulder.
Moments later she was dead, sank in her chair with blood that bundled on the desk in front of her, even when the live stream continued. The images only ended when another person picked up her phone, their face temporarily showed viewers.
According to the office of the state of Jalisco's Attorney General, Marquez was shot by a male intruder in her salon in a case that investigates it as a presumably femicid killing of a woman or girl for gender-based reasons.
The death of Marquez – a public figure with more than 100,000 Instagram followers – has sent shock waves by a country that has long been struggling with a high level of both murder and violence against women.
Only a few days earlier, another woman – a mayor candidate in the state of Veracruz – was also shot during a live stream, alongside three other people.
Although not all murders with women are femicides, many are that. In 2020, a quarter of the female murders in Mexico were investigated as femicides, with cases that were reported in each of the 32 states of Mexico, according to Amnesty International.
Last year there were 847 reports of femicide nationwide – and 162 in the first three months of this year, according to the figures from the Mexican government.
Mexico's reaction to murders in general, according to law groups, wants to say that too few investigations lead to prosecution.
“In 2022, around 4,000 women were killed in Mexico, which is 12% of all murders that year,” Human Rights Watch Americas director Juanita Goebertus told CNN. “And the number of cases that lead to a decision is around 67%.”
The most important challenge, said Geertus, is to increase the capacity of the authorities to investigate and protect witnesses and victims.
CNN has contacted the office of the attorney general for more information.
CNN's Ivonne Valdés, Veronica Calderon and Angelica Franganillo Diaz have contributed to this report.
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