Mónica Spear

Mónica Spear Mootz was a Venezuelan-American actress and beauty queen whose violent death drew international attention to the security crisis gripping her country. Born on 1 October 1984 in Maracaibo, Zulia, she was murdered on 6 January 2014 along the Puerto Cabello highway in Carabobo state at the age of 29.

Crowned Miss Venezuela in 2004, she represented her country at Miss Universe 2005 in Bangkok, where she finished in the top ten. She graduated from the University of Central Florida and built a steady acting career on Venezuelan and U.S. Spanish-language television, with leading roles in the telenovelas Mi prima Ciela, La mujer perfecta, and the Telemundo production Pasión prohibida.

On the night of her death she and her ex-husband Thomas Henry Berry were returning by car to Caracas with their five-year-old daughter Maya when their vehicle broke down. While they waited for a tow truck, a gang of robbers attacked the car, shooting Spear and Berry dead and wounding their child. The killings were broadcast worldwide and prompted then-president Nicolás Maduro to convene an emergency meeting on public safety.

Venezuelan authorities arrested and convicted several suspects, including minors, in the months that followed, with sentences ranging up to thirty years. Tributes poured in from across Latin American entertainment, and her funeral in Caracas drew large crowds.

The name Mónica is the Spanish form of Monica, traditionally derived either from the Greek monos meaning "alone" or, more likely, from a Berber name carried by Saint Monica of Hippo, mother of Augustine. The name connotes pious devotion in much of the Catholic world. She bore it through a brief but luminous career.