Donna Alexander, of Grand Prairie, Texas, was brutally murdered last month, just days after she had placed a prayer request for her murderer at church.
According to KTVT-TV, Alexander was beaten to death by her ex-boyfriend Nathaniel Mitchell, the same person she had lifted up in prayer just days prior.
“Her very last prayer request was for her assailant,” Brian Carter, the Associate Pastor at Crossroads Christian Church, told the local station. “His heart’s not right and [she] pray[ed] that his heart would soften.”
On Sept. 21, Mitchell brought Alexander to a local hospital claiming that she had fallen in the shower, and that’s why she was unconscious. Mitchell was promptly questioned by police, as his story about Donna’s fall did not match her injuries.
Alexander was a mother of two, who owned a local business called the Anger Room, a refuge for people who needed to relieve stress in a physical way, which allowed them to break and destroy a variety of things in a controlled environment. She created this space in order to keep people from physically harming others, something that was personal to her, as she grew up in Chicago, where she often witnessed such abuse.
Lauren Armour, Alexander’s sister, said Alexander waited “too long” on Mitchell, telling People that she “kept praying to God to fix [Mitchell].”
“She kept saying [in her personal journals], ‘I know [Mitchell] has problems, I know that he has post-traumatic stress, but he’s who I want to be my husband. Please fix him,’” Armour added.
Armour also told People that the day before Alexander was brutally beaten, she got into an argument with Mitchell that resulted in her breaking the relationship off.
“She returned home and went about her day with her children, and then apparently he went out to some nightclub prior to showing up at her house,” Armour said.
On Friday night around 3 a.m., Mitchell woke up Alexander and her children, ages 12 and 13, by banging on her door repeatedly.
“He then went around to the back of the house where my sister’s room was and broke the window,” Armour recalled. “The children said they heard arguing and screaming — their mother screaming. The children said that went on for a while until it got really quiet. The children texted their mom, asking, ‘Are you okay? Is he gone?’ or ‘Are you gone? What’s going on?’”
Police reported that Mitchell took Alexander’s phone, and pretending to be her, sent texts to her kids saying that she was fine.
“I’m fine, just get up in the morning and get ready for school,” he wrote, before waiting a few hours to take Alexander to the hospital.
By the time he brought her to the hospital at 5 a.m., Alexander was in a deep coma, with immense brain swelling — an injury so severe, it clearly could not have come from a shower fall, as Mitchell claimed.
“She acted between wanting to keep this man but also knowing that it was toxic,” Armour told People. “She even knew that it would be the death of her. It was in her journal.”
When Armour and her mother visited Alexander’s home after the murder, they saw that the bathroom and the shower were covered in blood.
“There’s no way she could have just slipped in the shower,” Armour said.
“[Mitchell] took away a life that he did not have a right to take,” Armour told People. “No one has a right to take a life that is not theirs. That is my sister. She is a daughter and a mother — gone.”
Alexander was killed by the thing she worked her whole life to spare others.
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“At 14, she knew what she wanted to do,” her father, Donald Alexander, told Dallas News. “She was really adamant about domestic abuse and working to do something for the community.”
“All she ever wanted to do was just help people,” Armour told People. “It didn’t matter what their background was — if she had it, she would give it.”
“We were brought up on the south side of Chicago. So life wasn’t always easy, dealing with violence, experiencing homelessness with our mother,” she said. “Our mother’s experienced domestic violence herself. There’s times when we’ve even been hungry. However, my mother was determined to make sure that we had what we needed.”
“She’s experienced hardships where she couldn’t pay her rent. Even though she had these things working against her — she’s a mother with two children — she didn’t let it stop her,” Armour added. “Her drive kept her moving forward and she got back on her feet, and when she started her business, she just started to soar. That’s inspiring to me.”
Mitchell is currently being held at the Tarrant County Corrections Center. According to Armour, he and Alexander had a rather secretive relationship that was on-and-off for five years.
“She hid it from everyone, even those people that called themselves her close friends. They knew of him, but they even asked her if he hit her, and she told them no,” Armour said.
(H/T: People)