A year that began with domestic violence ended with domestic violence
Diosmary Mejia, a 21-yearold mother of two, was found dead last week in a basement apartment in Lawrence. Her boyfriend, Santana Guerrero Temporo, was arrested days later in Texas on a fugitive from justice charge. According to authorities, he had “been wanted for the murder” of Mejia on Christmas Day.
With Mejia’s death during the final week of 2023, the year ended much as it began in Massachusetts — with a shocking act of domestic violence.
A year ago this week, Ana Walshe disappeared on Jan. 1 from the Cohasset home she shared with her husband and their three sons. It was her employer — not her husband — who first reported her missing three days later. Brian Walshe was charged with murder, obstruction of justice, and improper conveyance of a human body. Ana’s remains have yet to be found.
With stories and headlines about hacksaws and Brian Walshe’s reported Google searches that included “How long before a body starts to smell,” it was a gruesome start to a year that seemed relentless in the number of domestic killings that ranged from intimate partner violence to what psychologists call “family annihilators” — when a suspect kills their family.
Before January ended, a Duxbury woman was accused of killing her three young children. She’s facing three counts of murder. Two weeks later, an Andover man killed his wife and 12year-old son. He died by suicide.
In most cases, and usually before police revealed the names of those killed, their manner of death, or a suspect, authorities offered some version of the same statement: “There is no ongoing threat or danger to the public.” That’s what officials said last week after a couple and their teenage daughter were found dead at their Dover home in what authorities called “a deadly incident of domestic violence.”
“It’s clear that this is a confined situation to this individual dwelling, and is no threat to the residents of the town,” said Michael W. Morrissey, Norfolk County’s district attorney.
Such statements are designed to reassure and calm rattled residents. But whatever their intention, it always seems a strange comment to make about a horror that leaves few communities unscathed.
In Massachusetts last year, husbands killed wives. Adult children killed their parents. Boyfriends killed current or former girlfriends. Parents killed their children. Suspects ranged in age from their 20s to their 70s. Some perpetrators died by suicide, while others escaped and remain at large.
Authorities believe Kevin Kangethe killed Margaret Mbitu, a 31-year-old nurse from Whitman described as Kangethe’s girlfriend, left her body in his car at Logan Airport, then boarded a flight to Kenya in November. Aaron Pennington has been on the run since he was accused of killing his wife, Breanne Pennington, in their Gardner home in October.
Both of those stories made national headlines probably because neither suspect has been apprehended. But many domestic violence homicides garner little more than a day or two of coverage in local media. There’s usually an emphasis on violence that occurs in affluent communities, as if it’s even more appalling that such atrocities can happen among those who live in multimilliondollar estates and send their children to tony private schools.
One website reporting on the murder-suicide of Rakesh and Teena Kamal, and their daughter, Ariana, 18, in Dover even put the reported price of the family’s home — where their bodies were found — in its headline. Speaking about the Dover murders, Morrissey emphasized, “I would say that this is an event to remember that the domestic violence crisis crosses all economic and social situations.”
Statewide in 2023, domestic violence claimed lives in mobile home communities, apartment buildings, and wealthy estates. It destroyed families, unnerved communities, and left questions about warnings missed or dismissed. Given the established links between domestic abusers and mass shooters, and that most mass shootings target a perpetrator’s family members, not random strangers, every unchecked act of domestic violence, prior to murder, is a threat to every community.
It is a crisis that cannot be quelled by mourning and makeshift memorials. No community is immune from domestic violence. When such events unfold, people are often quoted as saying, “Things like this don’t happen here” or they mention how safe and quiet their community is. This past year in Massachusetts proved yet again that any sense of safety or quietude does not eliminate the dangers of domestic violence that can lurk and erupt behind any closed door.