SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Dori: Ex-wife of road-rage shooter ‘not surprised,’ calls man killed ‘her hero’
Aug 26, 2022, 3:30 PM
After years of feeling ignored by police and the court system, the ex-wife of the man charged in a mid-July road rage shooting in South Seattle wants friends of the unarmed victim in that case to know the slain man “didn’t die in vain” and she considers Bob Jensen “her hero.”
“I’m not surprised that Angel shot and killed someone,” Soraya Cervantez told Friday’s Dori Monson Show listeners. “In my opinion, it was a matter of when it was going to happen and who it was going to be.”
Cervantez reached out to Dori after learning about her former husband Angel Valderrama’s role in the July 21 incident.
The shooting left Bob Jensen, 68, dead, while he was on his way for a routine mid-morning coffee at the Costco near the 4400 block of Fourth Avenue South.
Though Valderrama, 38, told police he fired in self-defense, witnesses and surveillance images contradict his version of events, King County prosecutors say. Valderrama has since been charged with second-degree murder and remains in jail in lieu of $2 million bail. His arraignment is scheduled for Sept. 1.
Meanwhile, Cervantez told Dori, prosecutors “are accurate about their suspicions.”
“This is a man who has been fascinated with firearms for as long as I can remember,” Cervantez told Dori, adding that she reached out to his show because she felt it was important for her to publicly “send sincere condolences to Robert Jensen’s family, friends and colleagues.”
She went on to describe a volatile marriage, divorce and Valderrama’s “long track record” of gun-related threats of violence. Cervantez shared several police investigation case numbers, including two in Kirkland involving her ex-husband. In one case, he was investigated for threatening people attending a political candidate rally. In another, Valderrama was arrested in 2020 for threatening a delivery driver.
Before their marriage ended, Cervantez said she suffered “violent experiences and his road rage, being a (vehicle) passenger, provoking drivers out of their vehicles.”
Since then, she said, she has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder “from my time being with him due to his violent outrages.”
Somehow, according to Cervantez, Valderrama was able to obtain firearms “even after petitions to the court,” including temporary protection orders and welfare checks involving their now six-year-old child.
“This has been the experience for my family and I every time we exchange our daughter: every time we exchange our daughter at public transfer places, Angel always makes sure his handgun is in our line of sight,” she told Dori. “He parks in a way where we can see him opening his truck arranging and rearranging his rifles and assault rifles. At a very young age, our child knew what an AR (assault rifle) was.”
In another incident, Cervantez said, Normandy Park police responded to “an altercation with the daycare director” where their daughter attended. The director “was threatened with her life,” she told Dori. “This was another situation where there was no follow-up from the court system nor the police department so these violent acts that I have recorded and documented have been ignored for years.”
It wasn’t until Valderrama’s arrest several weeks after the road-rage shooting involving Jensen that Cervantez felt anyone acted on her concerns. For that, she said, she considers Jensen her “hero.”
“I was reading how Cowboy Bob, how he was a very giving man . . . how he helped his neighbors,” she said. “I admired him helping his mom until her passing. His hydroplane community, his friends from grade school, Mark Fasano, Buddy Green . . . I just wanted to tell them Bob’s death wasn’t in vain.”
“The moment he (Bob) hunched over in his truck and took his last breath, he was helping two strangers – and that was my daughter and I – because we didn’t have enough outcry about his (Valderrama’s) violent acts. No one has heard us. Although Bob has passed, he passed in honor and he passed as my hero,” Cervantez continued.
“So you truly believe that if Angel is convicted of this murder, Bob’s death saved the lives of your and your daughter?” Dori asked.
“Without a shadow of a doubt,” she responded. “Without a shadow of a doubt.”
Listen to Dori’s entire interview with the former wife of an alleged South Seattle road-rage shooter who calls her ex-husband’s victim “her hero.”
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