Xavier Davis was sentenced to death in Texas for the murders of two adults and one child. According to court documents Xavier Davis would murder Gregory Carhee, Donyavia Lagway, and their daughter Harmony. Davis would also shoot the couple’s ten year old daughter who thankfully survived her injuries.
According to court documents Alexus Williams would hire Xavier Davies to murder the family after her relationship with Donyavia Lagway ended and she reconciled with Gregory Carhee. Alexus Williams is set to go on trial shortly.
Xavier Davis would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Xavier Davis Case
A Houston man who shot and killed a couple and their daughter inside their southwest Houston apartment in 2021 was sentenced to death on Thursday.
The sentence comes more than three weeks after 30-year-old Xavier Davis pleaded guilty to capital murder. The plea came just moments before opening statements started in his trial
Davis admitted to fatally shooting Donyavia Lagway, 29, Gregory Carhee, 35, and their 6-year-old daughter Harmony Carhee inside their home at the Totoro Place Apartments on Fondren
Prosecutors said a 10-year-old daughter was also shot and critically wounded. She survived by playing dead as she shielded her 1-year-old brother who’d been thrown across the room by Davis.
According to investigators, Alexus Williams hired Davis, a high school friend, to kill Lagway, who was her ex-girlfriend, and her entire family because Lagway ended their affair and reconciled with her husband.
Prosecutors said Xavier Davis was promised any money he found in the apartment and that Williams may have watched the killings unfold over FaceTime.
“She watched either the executions or the immediate aftermath of that family being wiped out,” then-prosecutor and current Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said in 2021.
Teare said Williams also attended the victims’ funerals.
Williams was arrested months after the killings following a lengthy investigation into text messages and encrypted data recovered from her phone.
She’s also charged with capital murder and due in court for a pre-trial hearing in April.
In a chilling opening statement delivered after the plea, prosecutor Chandler Raine recounted the final moments of the victims’ lives, telling jurors the last words both Gregory Carhee and Donyavia Lagway ever spoke.
He described the moment Lagway opened the door to a man she didn’t recognize. Wearing black from head to toe and armed with a silver Smith & Wesson revolver, Davis allegedly forced his way inside, where the family was gathered in the living room.
After executing Carhee and then Lagway in front of their three children, Davis turned the gun on their daughters. Both girls had their hands raised in the air when they were shot. Harmony died on the couch from a gunshot wound to the head, Raine said.
Despite being critically wounded, the quick thinking of Harmony’s older sister likely saved her life and her baby brother’s.
“She waited until he left and pretended that she was dead,” the children’s cousin, Ronette Terrell, said. “Then she locked the door, grabbed her little brother, and called her grandmother.”
The injured girl also called her mother’s sister and her father’s brother and begged them to come help. The brother got there before the police and found the bodies of his family members. He begged his brother to get up but he was already dead, Raine told the jurors.
“This was a very, very tragic scene,” Houston Police Department Assistant Chief Patricia Cantu said at the time. “This was not only a difficult scene for us but for the family as well.”
And it could have been even worse. The couple’s 8-year-old son was not home during the attack.
Family members said Lagway had recently learned she was pregnant with her fifth child at the time of her death.
The evidence that led police to Xavier Davis
An anonymous tip the morning after the triple murder led detectives to identify Davis as the shooter.
Prosecutors said that on the day of the shootings, Davis carjacked the owner of the getaway car at gunpoint and later set it on fire using matches he bought with money he took from the victims.
The torched car was found in a field next to matches and a gas can. A cell phone found nearby included photos of Xavier Davis and was registered to his mother, according to prosecutors.
Geolocation data from the phone and the car provided more evidence, Raine told the jurors.
He said Xavier Davis tried to run away when police showed up to arrest him. When they caught him, they found $3,000 in cash in his pockets. Police also found two hollow point bullets with red polymer tips, the same type of bullets removed from the victims’ heads.
The murder weapon was found inside the apartment of Davis’s girlfriend with the same type of bullets inside, according to Raine.
‘Horrific’ behavior after his arrest
As his opening statement continued, Raine described Xavier Davis’s behavior in jail as “horrific.”
“He spits on staff. He squirts them with every substance imaginable from toilet water to urine to feces,” Raine said. “He sets fires. He engages in riots. He floods his cell. He assaulted a guard, caused him a couple of stitches even. He tampers with everything from his electrical socket to the locks on his door. And he is manipulative, man.”
They painted Xavier Davis as a career criminal who committed his first crime at the age of 13.
In their opening statements, Davis’ defense attorneys didn’t deny his guilt but rather argued that Williams also shared responsibility for the crime.
They said Davis’ difficult life circumstances led him to where he is today. He had just been released from prison, no job, no car, no money and a girlfriend described as a “hideous human being,” by Davis’s attorney.
“There are forces that can affect a human being that make you do things that other people wouldn’t dare,” defense attorney John Keirnan told the jury.