Two Questions About The Movie

1. I don't know the answer to why the movie left out the actual murder scene. I can only guess: The movie was executive produced by Selena's father and was written and directed by a man who wanted to pay tribute to Selena's life rather than her death. IIRC, her family have said in interviews that they didn't want to give any more attention to the woman who murdered her than they had to in order to portray Selena's life on film. They wanted her life and her achievements to be the main focus of the story.

The screenwriter pretty much portrayed her death symbolically. In the beginning of the movie, Selena and Suzy are outside looking at the moon. Selena explains to Suzy that she's dreaming about her future as a famous singer. While the children are looking at the moon there's a short scene of Selena's dream, she's wearing the white dress and is onstage alone. She just begins to sing, but the scene ends.

Later in the movie, when she's an adult, she's expresses worry to her mother about whether fans will like her when she crosses over to the english language part of her career. She tells her mom that she's even had dreams about it. Then we see the "death" scene.

That scene shows Selena onstage, alone, in the white dress, exactly as she envisioned when she was a child, and she's singing in english. An unseen fan throws her a white rose (which are used throughout the movie) but this time, she misses the rose. She doesn't catch it, it eludes her, she misses her dream and it never comes true.

2. I've read two books about Selena. One by her husband Chris Perez and one by one of the prosecutors in the murder trial. Neither one mentions anything about the mall scene in the movie. I don't know if it ever happened but I have seen comments online from people saying that they felt that scene was sort of lifted from Pretty Woman. That made me wonder if that movie was one of Selena's favorites so they included a similar scene, or if maybe they just wanted to let the viewer know that there was still a lot of prejudice and ignorance in the early 90s and this scene got that point across.