Gabrielle Del Angel, remembered by family as “Gabby,” was shot in 2023 while waiting in a Jeep as her husband tried to leave.
SAN ANTONIO — Nearly three years after Gabrielle Del Angel was fatally shot while waiting in a Jeep outside a South Side taco stand, the man convicted in her killing, Roland Contreras Jr., was sentenced to 50 years in prison in Bexar County.
The ruling answered the criminal case, but it also returned attention to the person at its center. Del Angel was 33, a mother of three and a special education teacher, according to court coverage and her obituary. Prosecutors said she was not the intended target when a confrontation broke out near a food truck on Southwest Military Drive in April 2023. The immediate consequence was a murder case. The longer consequence was the loss of a parent and educator whose life was reduced in court to seconds of violence.
Del Angel and her husband had stopped for food on the night of April 6, 2023. He was in line at the taco stand while she sat in their Jeep. Investigators later said Contreras approached the husband while yelling and carrying a gun. The husband ran back to the vehicle and tried to get away. In the rush to leave, he backed into a parked car. Contreras then fired through the driver’s side window, and the bullet hit Del Angel in the chest. Police said she did not appear to be the person he meant to shoot. Her husband drove to a nearby gas station for help, but she was pronounced dead there.
That sequence became the backbone of the prosecution. Authorities said the husband and Contreras knew each other through an ex-girlfriend, a connection that helped explain why the encounter may have turned personal so quickly. Still, the publicly available accounts leave parts of the confrontation unresolved. They do not describe a prolonged dispute before the gun was raised, and they do not set out a fuller motive beyond the fact that Contreras singled out the husband before firing. In that sense, the case carried both certainty and gaps: investigators could track the movement of the people involved, but not every thought or grievance that led to the shot.
At trial, the legal ending came fast. A Bexar County jury convicted Contreras, 35, of murder after deliberating for less than an hour, with local coverage placing the jury room time at about 30 to 41 minutes. Before the punishment phase continued, Contreras accepted a plea agreement that set his sentence at 50 years. Reporting from the hearing said he also was sentenced in connection with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for trying to shoot Del Angel’s husband. He will be eligible for parole after serving 25 years, according to local court coverage.
The path to that sentence was not immediate. After the shooting, police traced Contreras to a house in the 300 block of Humboldt, about 2 miles from the taco stand. Officers said he barricaded himself inside, prompting a standoff that lasted about 12 hours. When a SWAT team entered the home, he was no longer there. A covert police unit later found and arrested him about a month after the shooting. That monthlong gap stretched out a case that had already shattered one family in a single night and kept the suspect’s whereabouts part of the story long after the gunfire stopped.
Del Angel’s family obituary offered a different record of the case than the court file did. It named her children, her mother and siblings, and described a woman who loved her students and put others first. In court, those details functioned as the human measure of the sentence. Outside court, they explain why this case drew attention beyond one parking-lot argument: the victim was a familiar presence in classrooms and in family life, not only a name in an indictment. The sentence closes the prosecution, but the loss it addressed remains a community fact, not just a legal one.
With the verdict entered and the 50-year sentence imposed on March 27, the case has moved out of its trial phase. The next developments, if any, would come through appeals or future parole review rather than another jury proceeding.
Author note: Last updated April 18, 2026.