LaToya Minus knew something was wrong when her oldest daughter, Dejah Jenkins-Minus, didn’t show up for dinner that Thanksgiving in 2021, her newborn baby in tow.
That the outgoing 22-year-old hadn’t been home all day didn’t immediately worry Minus, who could see from her daughter’s iPad location that she was in Lowell, where she often stayed with the father of her baby, Leonard Robinson.
Always one to bring people together, Minus busied herself preparing a feast of fried turkey, collard greens, stuffing, and pig feet.
But that food never made it to the table.
Minus’s text messages to her daughter went unanswered. Darkness fell and Minus learned that none of Dejah’s friends had heard from her, either. Her worry started to grow.
Around 10 p.m., Minus drove an hour from Dorchester to Lowell. Robinson’s house was dark and Dejah’s car wasn’t out front. She drove home with no answers and called the police, but they told her it was too soon to take action.
The next morning, the police called back. Robinson, who was facing gun charges, had cut off his ankle monitor. Minus raced back to Lowell in the pouring rain.
By the time she arrived, police and other family members were on the scene. One of Robinson’s relatives crawled through a window and kicked down a locked bedroom door. Inside, he found Dejah — neck broken, naked with an air mattress on top of her, and, according to prosecutors, stabbed at least 58 times. The baby was nowhere to be found.
Minus wandered down the street in a daze and sat on a stranger’s porch. Staring at the Merrimack River, she contemplated throwing herself in.
The baby, Dai’Lani, was found safe at Boston Medical Center later that day, with dried blood on her diaper bag. Robinson was arrested three days later in Dorchester and charged with Dejah’s murder.
For Minus, the five years since have been a purgatory of anguish and heartache. Life has continued without Dejah, but Minus hasn’t been able to move on. Robinson remains in jail awaiting trial, and each of the six times it’s been postponed has been a reminder he could walk free. Until she’s sure Robinson is never going home, she says, “I don’t know how to grieve.”
For families grappling with loss from violent crime, the wait for justice can be agonizing. Months turn into years without closure — and the wound gets reaggravated with each postponed court date.
Despite a lower volume of cases nationwide over the past decade, the legal system moves more slowly than it used to. And it has been particularly slow in this case. The average disposition time for homicides — from arraignment to verdict — is currently 617 days in Massachusetts, according to state data, up from 460 days in 2017.
By the time Robinson’s trial begins on February 22 — if it isn’t rescheduled again — it will have been 1,692 days since he was arraigned in Middlesex Superior Court. And more than 1,900 days since Dejah was killed.
All the while, Minus, 44, has been raising her granddaughter. She was there when Dai’Lani, who calls her “Mama,” said her first words and took her first steps. A kindergartner now, Dai’Lani loves rollerskating and racing her scooter around their small apartment. Minus’s youngest daughter, who was 10 when her sister died, is in high school; her middle daughter is now 22, the age Dejah was when she was killed.
In addition to her work as a school bus driver, operating her own business transporting children to day care and summer camp, and making DoorDash deliveries, Minus channels her sorrow into making sure no one forgets the daughter she gave birth to at 16. Her name is emblazoned on pillows, blankets, sweat shirts, and water bottles. A life-size image of Dejah, dressed in white, smiling beatifically with her hands on her pregnant belly, is displayed just off the kitchen.
On the first anniversary of Dejah’s death, back in 2022, Minus released 365 helium balloons at Carson Beach in South Boston: one for every day her daughter had been gone. Minus still releases balloons to mark her passing, usually purple, Dejah’s favorite color. But she can no longer manage a balloon for each day that has passed.
Dejah began dating Robinson, who grew up in the same neighborhood, when they were both teenagers.
A happy, outspoken girl with a contagious laugh, Dejah was a Pop Warner cheerleader who, like her mother, always had her nails done and loved to get decked out, as she did each year in feathers and sequins for Boston’s Caribbean Carnival parade. She was affectionately known as Dejah Starr, a moniker she gave herself, or Mae, a nickname she was given as a child because she moved slowly, “like an old lady.”
She and Robinson hung out in the same friend group, often at Chez-Vous Roller Skating Rink in Dorchester. Dejah’s friends remember Minus picking them up in her minivan at the end of those nights, offering a ride to whoever needed one.
Dejah worked throughout high school and after — at Shake Shack, Party City, a beauty supply store, TD Garden — and graduated with honors. She had just started at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she planned to study criminal justice, when she got pregnant.
Robinson was headed in a different direction. As a teenager, he was convicted of armed carjacking, armed robbery, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. He lived with Minus’s family after he was released from a Department of Youth Services facility, working as a trainer at a gym and recording rap songs.
Over the next few years, he was arrested multiple times — for allegedly stealing cellphones, possession of counterfeit bills and marijuana, and knocking a woman down after robbing her at an ATM. He was charged several times with having a loaded, unlicensed firearm, once with Dejah in the car; the last time, he was locked up right after she got pregnant, and released a month before she was killed.
Minus knew about Robinson’s criminal history when he moved in, but wanted to give him another chance. Her daughter loved him, and Minus worried she would lose her if she shut him out. So they all lived under the same roof, though Dejah and Robinson mostly kept to themselves.
He had never been violent with Dejah, Minus says. But a week before she was killed, according to Minus, she came home with a black eye that Dejah said was inflicted by Robinson.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Robinson questioned in a Facebook post whether he was Dai’Lani’s father. He wanted a paternity test. (Minus doesn’t know if one was ever conducted.)
Robinson, his attorney George Murphy, and his mother did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Little is known about what happened that Thanksgiving in 2021.
Dejah left her mother’s house in the middle of the night and arrived at Robinson’s house in Lowell around 2 a.m. That afternoon, a neighbor saw Robinson sitting in Dejah’s silver Kia sedan staring straight ahead for about 20 minutes, according to a Lowell police officer’s testimony. His GPS ankle monitor showed that he then drove to Boston, went to three different addresses, and removed the monitor at 4:56 p.m.
The next day, Dejah’s body was discovered, along with a bloody knife in the trash.
Keisha Gamble, Dejah’s longtime mentor through a community program, had watched her blossom over the years. After Dejah’s death, Gamble went to events memorializing her for the first three years, but had to stop. “It’s like constant trauma,” she says. “It became too much for me.”
“It’s hard to know that you’re a mentor and you tried to save this kid’s life,” Gamble says, choking back tears. “Seven years of laughing and happy moments and just trying to help her make something of herself, helping her build the confidence that you are bigger than where you come from, you are better than what they say about young Black girls.”
All the teens and young women Gamble mentored were dealing with some form of trauma from inner city living, she says: an absent parent, poverty, violence, failing schools. But Dejah had support services in place and people who loved her, Gamble says. She was moving forward.
“Still,” she says, “she was pulled in, and we lost her.”
The day before Halloween in 2025, Minus took the morning off from work to attend a pretrial hearing over Zoom. The trial had been set for December 1, but the defense attorney said he needed more time to complete DNA analysis and review 1,100 pages of psychiatric records.
When Robinson was first arrested, the courts were still backed up from the pandemic. Murphy, a longtime criminal defense lawyer from Woburn appointed by the court, also repeatedly requested more time to analyze evidence and find experts, and for his own health-related issues. In June of 2023. In December of 2024, then again in April 2025.
This time, the judge pushed the date back again, to August 2026.
Minus, her ponytail pulled through a baseball cap that read “#Dejah,” wiped away tears with long red nails as she watched on her phone at home: “That’s crazy,” she said. “I didn’t even know that this stuff could take this long.”
The most complex cases disposed through a jury trial in fiscal 2026 in Massachusetts — including charges of kidnapping, rape, and murder — took nearly three years on average, more than 10 months longer than in 2019, according to the Trial Court of Massachusetts.
In Middlesex County, a Globe analysis of 121 homicide cases between 2013 and 2023 found that, among cases that went to trial or are still ongoing, about a fifth have dragged on longer than Robinson’s.
The extended wait is due in part to an explosion of information — DNA evidence, cell location data, social media posts — that can be analyzed, says Daniel Conley, a former Suffolk County district attorney who is now special counsel at the law firm Mintz. More attention is also being paid to defendants’ mental health issues, he says, and more experts are called.
As time goes on, though, memories fade, witnesses die, and evidence can be lost. But if the prosecution pushes for a quicker timeline, a defense attorney could argue that the case was rushed to trial as part of the appeals process.
“The system has a built-in inertia to it,” Conley says. “It’s a strategy, and it’s not a bad one for the defense: ‘Let’s run the clock out on this.’”
Prosecutors, too, can “weaponize” this inertia, says Mac Hudson, a community liaison at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts. Many defendants accept plea deals because they’re tired of waiting in jail before trial. Jails offer inmates fewer resources and less mobility than prisons, where they have access to a gym, yard, and law library, in addition to classes, jobs, and TVs inside cells.
“Part of the state’s strategy has always been to get folks into custody first and foremost, and then to wait them out in hopes that they plead out,” Hudson says.
But this hasn’t happened in Robinson’s case, leaving Minus in limbo.
About a month after that readiness conference, on the fourth anniversary of Dejah’s death, dozens of people gathered at her grave in a steady drizzle, candles flickering in the wind. R&B music played while friends and family, decked out in Dejah-themed pins and sweat shirts, laughed, cried, and hugged.
Dai’Lani, wearing a My Little Pony hat and carrying a flashlight, stood in front of her mother’s grave with Minus and Dejah’s father, Lamar Jenkins. Each of them kissed the tombstone one by one.
“You still got some soldiers around you,” Jenkins said.
A slow chant went up, gradually growing louder: “De-jah. De-jah. De-jah.”
“You’re gonna get your justice,” a woman called out.
The next afternoon, at another gathering in honor of Dejah, Dai’Lani played tag between the gravestones as people started to congregate and cranked up the music again:
Every step I take/ Every move I make/ Every single day, every time I pray/ I’ll be missing you
For victims and their families, the uncertainty of a slow judicial system can be worse than an acquittal, says Eli Adler-Roth, a therapist who works with domestic violence survivors at the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center based in Amesbury. Each court date is a reminder of grief.
“It’s hard for somebody to feel safe in the world again when there’s such a big uncertainty as an unresolved case hanging over their head,” he says.
In Boston’s Black communities, where Minus has lived her whole life, the drawn-out legal process is hardly unusual. In June, her friend’s brother was sentenced to life without parole for killing a man and shooting the man’s fiancée during a home invasion in Dorchester. It took 11 years for his case to go to trial.
In another case, from 1993, 15-year-old Louis Brown was caught in a gunfight and killed near his Dorchester home. Following his death, his family received little support or information, says his mother, Clementina Chéry.
“The system is not designed to be compassionate,” she says.
When survivors are unsupported and kept in the dark, it erodes trust and deepens trauma — and may even lead to more violence, says Chéry, who founded the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, which holds an annual Mother’s Day Walk for Peace to support the families of murder victims. Minus has participated in the event since before her daughter was killed.
Richard Wright, a criminal justice professor at Bridgewater State University, has long known about the lack of consideration given to survivors with few resources. But when his sister was murdered in California in 2016, along with her partner and son, he got an up-close look.
During the six years it took for their killer to be convicted — delayed by COVID and a plea change — Wright realized the situation was worse than he had thought. The only legal record for those who have been impacted by violent crime, directly or indirectly, is a victim impact statement, he says, and the vast majority of survivors don’t give one because it’s so painful.
There is an “implicit victim hierarchy,” Wright says, that “leaves people who have the least resources and least support to be retraumatized and revictimized.”
On a rainy Saturday in May, Minus and a half dozen women decorated a Dorchester function room for the fourth annual Mother’s Day brunch in honor of Dejah. Soul music was cranking and everything was ensconced in purple — a symbol of domestic violence awareness, a cause Minus hopes to one day promote with a nonprofit in her daughter’s name.
There’s an old proverb that people experience two deaths: one when they’re no longer living, and another when people stop saying their name. Events such as these are Minus’s way of making sure her daughter doesn’t die a second time.
They’re also a reflection of the person Minus has always been, one who’s quick to crack a joke and loves getting people together. She even has a side hustle as an event planner and can create a balloon arch in minutes. As she puts it, anything she tries to do small inevitably turns out big.(More than 500 people showed up to Dai’Lani’s first birthday party, bearing so many gifts that it took two U-Hauls to transport them home.)
The parties each year on Mother’s Day — for her daughter who never had the chance to celebrate, and for all mothers lost to domestic violence — are especially extravagant.
At the Dorchester event, Dai’Lani, her purple dress on backward, ran around joyfully, calling out “Can’t get me!” to whoever would chase her. A survivor who had never met Minus told her: “It’s OK to cry, we’re here to hold you up,” as tears streamed down both their faces.
“I’m not going to let your daughter’s name go in vain,” the woman said later.
Though Minus surrounds herself with friends and family, she often goes to Facebook to express her grief, posting pictures, ranting about court delays, and reposting news of other crimes. She hopes that by being open about her daughter’s death, she might hear from someone who knows something, so she can better understand what happened.
She uses Facebook as a journal, therapist, and support network — a place where she admits to drinking too much and struggling to pay the bills as a single mother of three. The main photo on her page is of her daughter’s white casket. Another photo shows Dejah’s grave decorated for Dai’Lani’s birthday, a T-shirt that says “Mommy of the birthday girl” draped over the tombstone.
Her online activity has brought hate, too. After Minus responded angrily to a Facebook post listing Boston’s best rappers, which included Robinson, she got a flurry of disturbing texts. One commented that Dejah was killed “while the baby was watching,” followed by five crying laughing emojis.
Another threatened to post pictures of Dejah’s body online, followed by: “Let’s play b----.”
In the years since Dejah’s death, higher-profile slayings have occurred and been resolved. Karen Read was charged with killing her boyfriend with her SUV in early 2022, went to trial — twice — and was acquitted in June 2025. Lindsay Clancy admitted to killing her three young children in early 2023 but pleaded not guilty, saying she was suffering a psychotic break; that case ended in a mistrial in September.
Crimes involving white victims result in higher arrest rates than for victims of color, according to a 2018 Washington Post investigation of homicides in neighborhoods across the country where arrest rates are low — and that are primarily home to low-income Black residents. One police chief told the Post that many victims were involved in gangs or drugs, which made it harder to get witnesses to cooperate — especially in communities of color historically subject to racist policing, where people may not trust law enforcement.
Crimes with white victims also result in thicker case files compared with Black victims, indicating that prosecutors put in more effort to secure convictions, according to a study led by a Northeastern University researcher. This could be in part because white victims generate a disproportionate number of news stories, which can lead to more tips from the public and put pressure on the legal system to resolve such cases.
High-profile cases tend to get priority, says Jack Lu, a retired Massachusetts Superior Court judge, as do those for which the victim’s family is educated about the criminal justice system and can apply pressure on prosecutors.
“In my opinion, the American criminal legal system, and the Massachusetts criminal legal system, do suffer from a case of the attractive white woman syndrome,” Lu says.
Minus admits she doesn’t understand all the legal terminology and hasn’t been as informed as she’d like, but she’s been hesitant to make waves. In April, however, her victim advocate, Susan Marshall, told her that given the amount of time that had passed, she should start making some. So she did.
After four days of leaving messages for Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan, Minus got a call. Ryan assured her that it took time to build a strong, fair case that, if Robinson is convicted of first-degree murder, could put him away for life.
Minus asked Ryan why she’d never been given the list of Dejah’s possessions, something she’d been requesting for years. Two weeks later, Minus was at the district attorney’s office in Woburn, finally looking at the evidence list, which included Dejah’s cellphone and Dai’Lani’s baby bag. She was allowed to take home one item: Dejah’s Canada Goose coat.
In the parking lot afterward, she hugged the puffy gray coat to her chest and wept.
Dai’Lani knows her mother is dead, but she doesn’t know what happened, or that the man accused of killing Dejah is her own father. For now, Dai’Lani is still sweet, heartbreaking innocence. Over the summer, she asked her grandmother how her mother died. When Minus couldn’t answer, Dai’Lani asked: “Is it because people are supposed to die?”
Not so young, Minus wanted to tell her. Not like that.
Children of slain parents often reexperience their loss at every developmental milestone, therapists say: their first day of school, learning to drive, getting married.
Dai’Lani hit one such milestone in late June, when she graduated from preschool, wearing a stole decorated with photos of Dejah and the words, “Mommy I did it.”
Six little graduates marched into the room chanting a call-and-response anthem: “We are the rising stars,” the boy in front yelled. “We are the rising stars,” the others shouted in reply. Each child shared their knowledge of Black history, announced their career ambitions — the girls were all determined to be cheerleaders — and sang songs at the top of their lungs. During “You Are My Sunshine,” Dai’Lani pointed at Minus, who blew Dai’Lani a kiss and wiped her eyes.
Dai’Lani started at the preschool shortly after Dejah was killed, and director Damequa Williams made sure she was well cared for — no pictures online, an assistant helping with pickups and dropoffs.
“We try to be a village for her,” Williams says. “People don’t realize the trauma is with everyone in the family.”
One day, Minus knows she’ll have to explain everything to her granddaughter.
Until then, she wants Dai’Lani to hold on to her innocence as long as she can.
At the most recent trial readiness conference, on October 1 at Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn, Minus stared intently at Robinson as he entered the room, his ankles and wrists shackled, Bible in hand. Only a month until a jury would finally decide his fate.
But Robinson’s attorney once again told the judge he wasn’t ready. Robinson wanted to proceed, Murphy said, but the defense needed time to find an expert to analyze GPS records from his ankle monitor.
“This can’t be happening,” Marshall, the victim advocate, said from her seat in the front row near Minus. “They always have the upper hand.”
The judge granted the continuance. The trial is now scheduled for February 22, with a readiness conference set for January 5.
Minus shook her head, a tear sliding down her cheek.
She and Robinson had locked eyes briefly, before he sat down. It was something they’d done so many times over the years, Minus said later outside the courthouse. “We’re just watching each other age.”
This story was produced by the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter here.
Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston. Jessica Rinaldi can be reached at jessica.rinaldi@globe.com.