In the dark, early-morning hours of May 16, 2024, Esmeralda Contreras Mata endured a horrific death at the hands of the father of her three youngest children.

Thabiso Makhafola, 31, raped and beat Mata, 25, before bludgeoning her with a hatchet and leaving her to die in the house they shared in Security-Widefield, according to a 116-page incident report from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.

He then went out to a shed in the backyard and, standing on paint cans, hanged himself with a rachet strap.

Mata’s four children, ages 2, 4, 5 and 11, were in the home during the seven-hour ordeal, which was captured on video cameras Mata set up inside because she had been concerned about her relationship with Makhafola.

“The kids are interacting with them. He makes her put one of the girls to bed when her head is already bashed open. He changes the baby’s diaper during this brutal attack on her. It’s awful and terrible in every possible way it can be,” said Darla Barbee, the grandmother of Mata’s oldest child, who was fathered by Barbee’s son.

In 2018, Barbee’s husband adopted Mata at her request, making Barbee Mata’s surrogate mom.

But what really drives the relentless pain bone-deep is that Barbee thinks this murder-suicide was preventable. “If he would have been deported, she would still be here.”

The story of the couple’s sad ending relates two divergent journeys of immigration.

Makhafola, who went by his middle name of Joscky, was a South African native living in the United States illegally, holding a nearly decade-old, expired student visa to study food science. And he was actively committing crimes.

Ironically, Mata also was an immigrant, whose birth mother brought her to the United States from Mexico when she was 1 year old.

But Mata was dedicated to maintaining full legal status in the United States, Barbee said.

“She had registered with all of the agencies she was required to and kept her paperwork up to date,” she said. “There were many hoops she and her sister had to jump through over years and years, but they did everything they were asked. They had to apply for DACA every two years, and after that they were finally allowed to apply for Social Security numbers.”

Mata, known as “Ezzy,” was 15 when she gave birth to her first child, fathered by Barbee’s son. Mata met Makhafola in 2017 at the Colorado Springs doughnut shop where they worked. They dated off and on.

Makhafola was a controlling man, relatives told sheriff’s deputies investigating the case.

Additionally, the couple struggled financially, and Makhafola had drinking problems and was taking prescription medication for anxiety and depression, the incident report showed.

“We knew he was not a good person. We knew he was here illegally,” Barbee said. “We did not understand the scope of how abusive that relationship was and what kind of circumstances she lived under.”

Criminal records show the Colorado Department of Revenue pursued legal action against Makhafola in 2020 for money he owed the state.

On Jan. 27, 2022, Mata filed a protection order against Makhafola. The case initially was listed as domestic abuse, then changed to Mata being an “associate,” according to public records. But the order was dismissed the same day it was filed. The reason is unknown.

Mata’s birth mother told sheriff’s deputies after her daughter’s death that Makhafola threatened Mata daily, hit her often, twisted her arms, “hurt the kids a lot,” and did “other bad things.”

Mata was “attempting to leave” Makhafola when he killed her, Barbee said, although the couple also had talked about getting married. Makhafola had discussed marrying Mata with Barbee’s husband, according to the deputies’ report.

A few years ago, when Mata was pregnant with her fourth child, she pressed charges against Makhafola for domestic violence and kidnapping because he held Mata against her will in a car after she said he abused her.

Most recently, Makhafola was arrested for DUI, his second offense, and sentenced in March 2024 to serve time in the El Paso County jail, which he did last spring.

The 2024 Easter gathering of the “big, tight-knit family” was the last time Barbee and her husband saw Mata, when she brought the kids to their home in eastern El Paso County while Makhafola was incarcerated.

“We were as a family obviously very concerned about him,” Barbee said. “We just thought, ‘They’ll pick him up and he’ll be deported.’ It was crazy to us that he kept committing crimes and nothing was happening. There were no repercussions for him.”

In February 2024, Makhafola was taken into custody and entered the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Denver Contract Detention Facility in Aurora.

“We were all incredibly relieved because as a family we were like, ‘This is going to take him out of the picture. He’ll be gone,’” Barbee said.

But a judge released Makhafola so he could fight his deportation under due process. The family would later learn that Mata was helping him oppose his impending deportation.

There are numerous ways someone could be let go from ICE custody, a spokesperson from the Aurora facility said via email.

“They could post bond, be released into the alternative to detention program, may be placed on temporary protective status, applied for a special visa, they may be in the asylum process, they could have been ordered released by an immigration judge, they could have been granted admission to the country.”

A few months later, Mata was dead.

Now, Barbee is working to turn the tragic conclusion of Mata’s young life into a hopeful, healing venture for others who encounter domestic violence.

Last week, The Ezzy Project became registered with the state as a legal organization, and Barbee is seeking 501c(3) nonprofit status as a tax-exempt entity.

The concept for the organization is multitiered. Barbee plans to use rescue horses she and her husband care for at their ranch in Hanover to comfort grieving children and adults, not therapeutically but supportively.

“When people interact with animals, connection and healing start to happen because they don’t have to talk about anything or relive anything with an animal,” she said. “It’s a unique interaction, particularly with horses, that offers that kind of healing.”

The nonprofit also will board animals displaced through domestic violence, provide education on bystander responsibility  and award scholarships to cosmetology school. That career path was Mata’s dream.

“She was a Mary Kay consultant and wanted to go to beauty school and have her own product line,” Barbee said. “She was beautiful inside and out. A sweet and loving woman who was going to do great things in the beauty industry.”

One year later, the hole in the family is still bottomless. Mata’s children are “doing well for what you can expect,” Barbee said. “It’s indescribable knowing what they saw. There’s a lot of therapy.”

The younger of the two daughters — the 4-year-old girl Mata was forced to put to bed while her head was severely gashed and bleeding — suffers from frightening night terrors, Barbee said.

Mata’s oldest child, who had called 911 when he couldn’t wake up his mom and told authorities he thought she was dead, lives with his father, who’s Barbee’s son. The boy is contributing his ideas to The Ezzy Project.

“He said, ‘I want to make sure we do something with dogs because mom loved dogs,’” Barbee said, adding that she plans to provide trained support dogs for domestic violence survivors or others in need.

Mata’s three youngest kids, who lost both parents on that unthinkable day, live with Mata’s biological sister.

The family marked the one-year anniversary of Mata’s death last month with a gathering at the gravesite, where many relatives wore T-shirts featuring a photo of Mata.

“A lot of guilt” remains over the situation, Barbee said. She spent her career as a social worker and therapeutic foster parent with El Paso County Department of Human Services and also with a private foster agency. Barbee has specialized in reactive attachment disorder, a condition in which children have difficulty forming healthy and secure emotional bonds with primary caregivers due to childhood trauma.

“I came from decades of working in the mental health field with very broken families that were victims of all sorts of different abuse,” she said. “Ezzy lived in a lot of fear she didn’t share with others.”

Each day, Colorado Springs police field some 35 domestic violence-related calls, according to TESSA, the primary prevention organization in El Paso County, which operates a crisis line (719-633-3819), a safehouse and multiple support programs for families. The organization received nearly 11,000 emergency calls last year and accommodated 462 people for nearly 7,000 nights of shelter, its annual report says.

Domestic violence-related deaths in Colorado fell to 58 in 2023, the most recent year statistics are available, down from 94 in 2022, according to the state Attorney General’s Office. Data from 2024 won’t be available until fall, a spokesman from the office said.

Barbee and other relatives knew Makhafola had a volatile nature. But they didn’t think he’d escalate from “being a jerk to picking up a hatchet and killing her in front of the kids.”

As indicated in the deputies’ report, Mata’s interaction with a man she had just met seemed to have incited Makhafola.

“Her story is an example of where grace and love should be extended to immigrants who are here doing the right things and contributing in great ways to our country, versus someone coming here, being illegal, committing multiple crimes and still allowed to be here,” Barbee said.

“This is not political. This was just preventable.”

A fundraiser for the new organization that Barbee is creating in honor of Mata is at https://www.givesendgo.com/TheEzzyProject. A website, https://theezzyproject.com/, will launch soon.