A family is left to wonder after the killing of a Lawrence woman on Christmas Day
It wasn’t until Diosmary Mejia moved to Lawrence in December 2022, that her father, Diojanny
Lara, met her in person as an adult.
When Lara left the Dominican Republic in 2003, Mejia was just a year old. The father stayed in touch with his daughter via phone and video. Then one day in 2022 Mejia told him she wanted to come to the United States. “She suddenly decided she wanted to leave,” Lara, a construction worker, told me. “I didn’t want her to come; I kept telling her, ‘wait until you finish college.’ But she didn’t listen.”
Mejia was killed on Christmas Day, according to authorities. She was 21. Mejia’s mother and Lara told me their daughter was in a relationship with Santana Guerrero Temporo, 53, also a Dominican immigrant. Guerrero Temporo was arrested Dec. 29 in Texas on a fugitive from justice charge. Guerrero Temporo is also wanted in connection with Mejia’s killing, according to Essex District Attorney Paul F. Tucker’s office.
Guerrero Temporo hasn’t been charged with Mejia’s killing; he is still in Texas awaiting a hearing there scheduled for Wednesday. At this time there is no date for his extradition to Massachusetts, according to Tucker’s office.
But Mejia’s case and that of another recent one in Dover where a man fatally shot his wife and daughter before killing himself bring to mind the “dramatic increase” in almost all categories of domestic violence incidents in Massachusetts. That’s according to the 2023 report released recently by the state’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team. The task force found that domestic violence-related homicides in the Commonwealth increased 55 percent in 2022 over the previous year. “These rates continue to demonstrate the need for improved prevention programming as well as continued survivor supports,” wrote the group, which includes law enforcement authorities, state appointed and elected officials, and victim advocates.
At the time of Mejia’s death, she was living with Guerrero Temporo in a basement apartment in Lawrence. Lara said he would caution his daughter about her relationship with Guerrero Temporo. “But it didn’t help,” he said. “I would warn her about the big age differential. And he seemed very controlling of her.” At the beginning of the couple’s relationship, over the summer, Guerrero Temporo took Mejia’s phone, Lara said. “He called me from her phone and I questioned him, ‘why are you calling me from my daughter’s phone?’ I went to see her because I thought maybe something happened to her. But she was fine, and I told her, ‘what are you doing in this relationship?’ She didn’t have an answer,” Lara told me.
Back in Baní, the city in the Dominican Republic where Mejia was from, the woman’s mother, Elva Mejia, is looking after her daughter’s children, two boys who are about to turn 7 and 3. She also didn’t want Mejia to move to the United States. “She kept telling me, ‘I want a better future for my kids.’ I would tell her to get her college degree first ... she wanted to be a teacher,” Elva Mejia said in an interview. “She’d say that she wanted to leave anyway and that if she didn’t have luck in the United States that she’d return here and go back to college.”
Elva Mejia said her daughter was a happy person who cared deeply for her boys. She liked getting her hair and nails done. She noted that her daughter stopped posting photos on Facebook and that her calls became less frequent since she began a relationship with Guerrero Temporo. She said she last spoke to Diosmary after midnight on Christmas Eve. “She was crying, she told me that she loved me and that she missed her children dearly,” Elva Mejia said.
It seems futile to think about the ‘what ifs.’ Yet it’s also understandable that Mejia’s parents feel like they could or should have done something to prevent their daughter’s senseless killing.
“The only person who can stop the cycle of violence is the person causing harm,” Arelis Huerta told me. Huerta is the director of the community-based domestic and sexual violence program for the YWCA Northeastern Massachusetts. She said she’s seen cases of domestic violence on the increase, both in the courts and in the program’s own numbers.
It’s no secret that women from marginalized groups struggle more with genderbased violence, even though no one is safe from intimate partner abuse. As a woman of color who had no legal status to be in the country, and a new immigrant and a mother, Mejia may have felt intimidated in the relationship, Mejia’s mother told me.
“We want to make it known that even if you are undocumented in this country, intimate partner violence is not tolerable and … you still have rights,” Huerta said.
As for the rise in domestic violence in the Commonwealth, two key takeaways from the task force are that there needs to be more public awareness and education around the identification of and resources for domestic violence and that data collection — to identify trends and measure successes, for instance — needs to be improved and streamlined. Indeed, the rise of domestic violence incidents demands a more robust response in Massachusetts. What are our elected officials waiting for?