Police have arrested and charged a second person in connection with the gruesome murder of a Black, gay college student who went missing in February and was found months later dead with burn wounds to his body and a gunshot wound to his head.
Isiah Baez, 19, was taken into custody on Thursday and charged with the murder of 19-year-old DeAndre Matthews. An alleged accomplice, 24-year-old Remy McPrecia, was apprehended on May 4 and charged with concealment of a human corpse and tampering with physical evidence.
On Feb. 6, Matthews went missing after he left his job at a detail shop that afternoon in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn and went home to borrow his mother’s car for the night. A day later, his mother Danielle, realized he had disappeared. She tracked her car to the 1600 block of Troy Avenue and found her vehicle charred.
That same day, police found Matthews’ burnt body with a gunshot wound in his head on train tracks in Flatbush, just five minutes away from where the car was left.
“He deserves any and everything that he gets,” Danielle Matthews said of Baez to News 12 The Bronx. “He deserves every day to rot in that jail. I cannot forgive him and I will not forgive him as of right now.”
DeAndre was a student at SUNY Broome Community College studying criminal justice. He was the first person in his family to go to college and worked two jobs. His family said he wanted to become a social worker.
“DeAndre would try to find the good in everyone…and I believe that was his downfall,” said his mother.
“This is disgusting. Like, my brother didn’t do anything to nobody, and I can really say that. He wasn’t in a gang. He wasn’t a violent kid,” DeAndre’s sister Dajanae Gillespie said. “He wasn’t a bad kid. You know what I’m saying? He stayed in the house.”
Baez has also been charged with criminal possession of a weapon, and tampering with physical evidence. Investigators haven’t released a motive for his murder so far.
