Florida police sergeant David Colón was preparing to leave for work when an unsettling phone call turned his morning upside down.
Officers had gathered outside his parents’ home in Hialeah and were preventing anyone from entering. David called his father, who went to the window to see why police were outside.
“He just let out this scream,” David recalled during the Sept. 13 episode of Oxygen’s Snapped. “It was just chilling.”
On the front porch, Miami-Dade Police Detective Damian Colón, David’s brother, was found lying in an enormous pool of blood. Damian still had a pulse and was airlifted to a hospital.
“We kept asking, ‘Why, why, why would anyone do this?’” David said. “That was heartbreaking for us.”
What Happened to Damian Colón?
Damian’s brother Daniel Colón described him as “feisty,” with a fondness for pulling pranks.
That bold, fearless streak helped steer Damian toward law enforcement. He graduated from the police academy and landed a job by age 20, later rising through the ranks to become a detective.
Away from the job, Damian shared a life with his longtime girlfriend, and the couple had two children. After that relationship ended, he began a new relationship with Yessenia Sanchez, a single mother.
Yessenia also pursued a career in policing, becoming an officer with the Miami-Dade Schools Police Department. Their relationship eventually fell apart after seven years. By 2022, Damian had moved back into his parents’ Hialeah home, where he would be shot that November.
Surveillance cameras at the home captured what unfolded at the crime scene.
The footage showed Damian exiting the house and getting into his unmarked police car to go to work. A few moments later, a red truck pulled up and blocked the driveway before the driver, later identified as Yessenia, got out.
As Yessenia approached Damian’s vehicle, he called 911.
“Hey, can you start me a unit?” Damian said in a recorded call. “Female with a gun in front of my house.”
With the 911 dispatcher still on the line, Damian walked back to his porch, and Yessenia was seen confronting him at the entrance to the home.
“He asks her what she’s doing there,” David told Snapped. “And she said something to the effect of, ‘Are you going to take me serious now?’”
Moments later, Yessenia raised the gun, pointed it at Damian’s face and fired.
“I don’t think he saw it coming,” Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office Major Yolande Jacinthe told Snapped, adding that Damian hit his head on a porch swing, which she believed broke his fall and prevented a “full-impact” collision with the ground.
“He’s lying there on the floor,” said Jacinthe, “and she casually walks away.”
As Damian’s family rushed to the hospital, another 911 call came in, this time reporting a hit-and-run collision. A red truck—driven by a woman who matched Yessenia’s description—hit a parked car before plowing into four more vehicles.
As investigators dealt with the crash, a third 911 call came in.
An off-duty officer reported that a boy had approached him, saying, “My aunt, Yessenia, was just involved in an accident. She’s in the house saying that she’s going to end it.”
Damian Colón and Yessenia Sanchez’s Volatile Relationship Comes to Light
Yessenia’s relatives restrained her until police arrested her. At the same time, Damian’s family told investigators that his relationship with Yessenia was volatile and violent.
David recalled allegations that Yessenia once “went crazy” and slashed Damian with a knife. He also described alleged altercations in which she threw objects at Damian, punctured his tires and held a gun to her own head while threatening suicide.
“She struck him several times,” noted Jacinthe. “The evidence definitely supported that there was domestic violence within that home.”
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Damian filed a police report, and in Sept. 2021, Yessenia was charged with battery and criminal mischief. As a result, she resigned from the police force.
But that wasn’t the end of their relationship.
David said his brother bailed Yessenia out of jail and refused to press charges—and the couple got back together.
By the summer of 2022, however, Damian had broken up with Yessenia. But the family was troubled by sightings of Yessenia driving by their home and her repeated calls to Damian. According to David, Yessenia had even followed Damian on a date with another woman.
Damian’s brothers felt that Yessenia was capable of harm, but that Damian considered her “all talk.” As David recalled Damian saying: “Don’t worry about it—she’s crazy but she’s not that crazy.”
Yessenia Sanchez Confesses to Shooting Damian Colón
When police questioned Yessenia, she admitted to shooting Damian and then fleeing to her parents’ home.
“It’s been brutal with Damian,” Yessenia told police in the recorded interview. “He just changed from one day to the next…It was like, his way, only.”
She added, “It was impossible to get anything out of him. Everything is, ‘no, no,’ and the disrespect and the constant dismissing me, not caring.”
Authorities determined that Yessenia’s motive was jealousy over seeing Damian with other women.
“He had moved on with his life, and she obviously hadn’t,” 11th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told Snapped. “She stayed in her rage, in her anger, in her violent self.”
Yessenia was charged with attempted murder, stalking and leaving the scene of an accident. She pleaded not guilty.
Damian eventually recovered and learned that Yessenia had shot him.
“It was emotional,” Damian told Snapped. “Just because I never thought something like that would occur, especially with somebody that I was so close with. I was betrayed by the person closest to me at that time.”
While Damian recovered, Yessenia prepared to fight her charges. But as her court date approached, she accepted a deal, pleading guilty to stalking and attempted first-degree murder. Yessenia was sentenced to 30 years in prison to be followed by 20 years of probation.
“I think justice is served,” Damian told the court during Yessenia’s March 2025 sentencing hearing. “I think she got what she deserved.”
Damian credits his family for his survival and wants to inspire others to heed their instincts in relationships.
“That red flag you’re seeing,” he told Snapped, “is waving for a reason.”