Crime

Lowell man convicted of Boston woman’s 2020 murder

Xavier DeJesus, 23, was found guilty by a Middlesex Superior Court jury on charges of second degree murder and several firearm charges, according to officials.

Carmen Athena Nieves's daughter Deija Mendez was murdered. She is photographed outside of her Mattapan home, with a photograph of her daughter. (Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)

By Gwen Egan

1 minute to read

More than three years after a 23-year-old Boston woman was shot and killed in Lowell, her murderer has been convicted, officials said Friday.

Xavier DeJesus, 23, was found guilty Wednesday by a Middlesex Superior Court jury on charges of second degree murder and several firearm charges, according to a statement from Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan’s office.

DeJesus will be sentenced on Monday by Middlesex Superior Court Judge Kenneth Salinger, according to the statement.

On June 23, 2020, Deija Mendez, 23, was shot and killed while she was sitting in the driver’s seat of a car on Coral Street in Lowell, according to officials.

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Police said she was shot in the head and died at the scene.

The investigation found that Mendez and another man drove to the home on Coral Street to pick up a car when a fight broke out about who it belonged to.

DeJesus left the home, got a gun, and came back before fatally shooting Mendez, according to officials. 

One witness said DeJesus called out Mendez’s name before open firing so she “would turn and look at him when he did it,” according to The Lowell Sun.

“Now two lives are destroyed … two families are destroyed,” Carmen Nieves, Mendez’s mother, told The Lowell Sun.

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“People need to know who she was,” Nieves told the paper.

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