State Police continue search for suspected killer of Deija Mendez

BOSTON — It is now just over two weeks since the brutal midday murder of 23-year-old Deija Mendez in Lowell, and the man authorities say shot her to death in a rented SUV, is still missing.

Twenty-year-old Xavier DeJesus is now one of the Massachusetts State Police’s Most Wanted Fugitives.

Middlesex County DA Marian Ryan told me Friday State Police are doing everything they can to find DeJesus.

“It’s hard to leave that community. And it’s hard to leave that community if you don’t have access to resources,” Ryan told me. “We are hoping that there are people up in the Lowell area who may know where he is. May have helped him to get to where he is now, and will come forward and tell us about that.”

Deija Mendez lived in Boston with her mother and two brothers.

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Her family tells me, on June 23rd, the young nursing student drove with a friend from Boston to Lowell to buy a car that Deija believed belonged to her friend.

The two even arranged to have a tow truck bring the new car back to Boston where it would be registered later.

Instead, something went drastically wrong.

Deija was found dead in the driver’s seat of the SUV, killed by a single gunshot wound to her head.

According to police files obtained by Boston 25 News, the car Deija was trying to buy, was in the possession of a woman named Selena Simonphone. According to the police report, Simonphone is a former girlfriend of Deija’s friend, and the current girlfriend of Xavier DeJesus the man accused of killing Deija.

DeJesus and Simonphone lived on Coral Street in Lowell, and that’s where Deija was shot and killed.

Details of the events leading up to Deija’s murder are unclear.

But according to the police report, investigators interviewed witnesses and reviewed surveillance video that showed DeJesus and two other men in the Coral Street area at the time of the Deija’s murder.

According to one witness, DeJesus admitted he shot Deija Mendez.

Selena Simonphone and two men, Angel Garcia and Devine McKinney, have been charged with intimidation of a witness, or misleading investigators.

While the facts of events leading up to Deija’s murder remain unclear, DA Ryan told me she is disturbed by the facts of the case that are already known.

“I have a daughter the same age. You worry every time they go somewhere. And you don’t worry as much when its 3:30 in the afternoon of a summer day and they are going a half hour, forty minutes away from home to do, what appeared to be, a pretty normal transaction,” Ryan said.

If you have any information on the whereabouts of Xavier DeJesus, call Mass State Police at 1.800.KAPTURE

Cox Media Group