HOUSTON — A Houston man who “massacred” a couple and their daughter inside their southwest Houston apartment in 2021 pleaded guilty to capital murder Monday. The surprise plea happened just moments before opening statements started in the trial of Xavier Davis, 30.
Davis stood silently before a Harris County judge as the charges were read aloud in his capital murder trial. Then he 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.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the case, the first death penalty trial in Harris County since 2022.
It seems like if anybody deserved the death penalty, senselessly executing a 6-year-old girl, that should do it,” prosecutor Alycia Harvey told the jury. “And he’s going to try and manipulate you throughout this trial. But you’re going to know, the evidence is going to show exactly who he is.”
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‘Very, very tragic scene’
In a chilling opening statement delivered after the plea, prosecutor Anthony Ray 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, Ray 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, the Ray 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 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 Davis and was registered to his mother, according to prosecutors.
Geolocation data from the phone and the car provided more evidence, Ray told the jurors.
He said 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 Ray.
‘Horrific’ behavior after his arrest
As his opening statement continued, Ray described 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,” Ray 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 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.
Prosecutors: Mastermind watched on her phone
According to investigators, Williams hired Davis, a high school friend, to kill Lagway, her ex-girlfriend, and the entire family because Lagway ended their affair and reconciled with her husband.
Prosecutors have said 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, the alleged mastermind, 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.