SALT LAKE CITY — Growing up in the foster care system and experiencing homelessness together, sisters Lyberdee and Tyrese Cisneros were inseparable.
“Every moment with my sister was never dull," said Tyrese. “She was very smiling. She was very loving. She had so much love to give. She was thoughtful.”
Salt Lake City Police are still investigating a shooting Sunday night that left 24-year-old Lyberdee dead. Her boyfriend, 20-year-old Jayden Wade, was booked into jail, suspected of murdering her. Tyrese plans to fight the rest of her life for him to stay behind bars because that's what Lyberdee would have wanted, she said.
“She survived foster care, she survived a lot," said Tyrese. "It makes me sad that she thought she couldn't survive this one.”
Tyrese said the abuse started two years ago, just a few months after Lyberdee began dating Jayden.
“She would send me videos where he would threaten her with a gun and he would call her degrading names," she said. "He's threatened to kill my family.”
Just hours before Lyberdee was shot and killed, Lyberdee told her sister she was trying to get away.
“The last thing she told me was that she wanted to build a report on Jayden and to make sure that he never hurt anybody again," said Tyrese. "I didn't think it would come with the price of her life.”
Tyrese believes her sister could have been saved.
“When I learned talking to some of her neighbors, they were scared to call the cops, and it's like, you should have called the cops," she said. "My sister probably could have been here.”
However, according to Utah Domestic Violence Coalition spokeswoman Kimmi Wolf, there’s only so much a call can do.
“There is a reason why domestic violence calls are some of the most violent and dangerous calls for law enforcement," she said. "They're encountering, face-to-face, a perpetrator who they don't know if he or she feels that they have anything left to lose.”
Tyrese will keep sharing her sister’s story and fighting for the man who killed her to stay in jail forever.
“I don't want nobody to feel or to wake up to their sister passed away," she said. "So if I could stop people from getting hurt, I want to.”
The Cisneros family has a GoFundMe to raise money to cover Lyberdee’s funeral costs.
