?Daughter, give us strength to fight?: family mourns teenager killed by LAPD

The Rev Al Sharpton delivered a eulogy on Monday for Valentina Orellana-Peralta, the 14-year-old girl killed by a Los Angeles police officer, denouncing LAPD's longstanding abuses, as her family remembered a bright young girl who excelled in school and had big dreams for her life in the US.

Valentina's parents cried over their daughter's open casket at the City of Refuge church in Gardena, south of LA, as Sharpton and the family's attorney, Benjamin Crump, stood by their side. The teenager was dressed in a pink dress, her favorite color, and the funeral programs featured a skateboard on the cover, celebrating one of her treasured hobbies.

Valentina was shopping for a Christmas dress with her mother on 23 December at a Burlington Coat Factory in North Hollywood when the LAPD officer William Dorsey Jones Jr fired three rounds at a 24-year-old man in the store, killing him and Valentina in the process.

When Valentina was shot, she was in a nearby dressing room with her mother, Soledad Peralta and died in her mother's arms. "There was nothing I could do. As I lay screaming for help, the police did not come to help me or my daughter," she said, days after the killing.

Footage of the events at the store showed that the 24-year-old, Daniel Elena Lopez, had assaulted several customers with a bike lock. Jones's body-camera footage revealed that the officer shot Elena Lopez from a distance, appearing to immediately fire three rounds before issuing any commands. Elena Lopez was standing alone at the other end of a store aisle, had no gun and appeared to be turning away from the officer the moment he was shot. He and Valentina both died on the scene.

Valentina moved to the US from her native Chile six months ago, and her parents said she was excelling at her school, High Tech Los Angeles in Van Nuys, despite English being her second language. She had ambitions for a career in engineering and technology and was interested in building robots, telling her mother that one day she would build a robot to help her around the house. Her parents said her primary dream was to become a US citizen.

"It is like my whole heart has been ripped out of my body," Juan Pablo Orellana Larenas, Valentina's father, told reporters at a recent press conference. He arrived from Chile days after his daughter was killed, and at a news conference held in his hand a skateboard, still in its plastic wrapping, that had arrived for Valentina on Christmas Eve, the day after she died. He said he would deliver the skateboard to her grave and lamented that the two of them would never get to see LeBron James play basketball in person.