Fourteen months after her murder, Mimi Ramirez’s last note to her mother, Carmen Rodriguez, remains scrawled on a whiteboard by the door of the comfortable Rodriguez home in Cornelia.
“Te Amo Mami,” the sign by her door reads, with a heart dotting the final ‘i’. Or in English: “I love you, Mommy.”
Carmen, who is 58, sat and spoke lovingly of her daughter last month in Cornelia and said she continues to exercise patience, while grieving, as the wheels of justice slowly turn.
Minelys “Mimi” Zoe Rodriguez-Ramirez, who in 2024 was a popular TikTok influencer—her videos are still online—and was living with her fiancé just outside Clarkesville. She was murdered with multiple gunshots to her face on October 22nd. She had just left the Walmart store in Cornelia; her body was found two days later in a wooded area off nearby Furniture Drive.
The night she vanished
Carmen had previously told Now Habersham that Mimi said she was going out that Tuesday night to sell someone a photo. She texted her fiancé that evening from Walmart, and according to her mother, she was on the phone with her fiancé, telling him that she had just spotted Angel de Jesus Rivera-Sanchez, whom she previously knew as the friend of a former boyfriend. She was apparently unafraid of him and stopped to talk. But that was the last communication with Mimi that anyone knows of. Her mother reported her missing the following day.
On Monday, October 28, 2024, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents arrested Rivera-Sanchez, then 24, in Atlanta, on charges of kidnapping related to the disappearance of Mimi, then 25. He was reportedly attempting to leave the country. The GBI found Mimi’s body the following day, and the suspect was then charged with murder as well. He has been held at the Habersham County Detention Center ever since.
Carmen said the GBI investigators have told her they have surveillance video, to be used as evidence, of the victim and her alleged murderer conversing, but none of the murder itself. “That was hidden,” she said, “over by Furniture Drive, just past Little Caesars (pizza parlor).
“I’m not allowed to see the video,” because the investigation is ongoing, Carmen said, “but they said they’ll give me everything after the trial.”
In late December, Carmen discussed the devastating impact of her daughter’s murder on the family, though not everyone in the family is fully aware of what happened.
The daughter doesn’t know
Mimi’s own nine-year-old daughter, for example, doesn’t know exactly what became of her mother. “We told her (Mimi) got sick and God took her,” Carmen says. For the first little while, they protected Carmen’s aged parents as well, though now the couple, who live in Puerto Rico, are aware of what happened. Carmen’s granddaughter has been living in Puerto Rico with her own father—a former boyfriend of Mimi—since her mother was killed.
Carmen says her own mental well-being has been fragile. She sees a counselor regularly and receives medication to help her with sleep and anxiety issues.
“I’ve always been the heart woman” in the extended family, she said. “I’m the person that everybody in the family goes to when they need help; then something happened to me.”
She relies heavily on the love and support of her remaining five children–Mimi was the baby of the family. Carmen is a widow; her husband died suddenly of a brain aneurysm several years ago.
Allegations of organized crime
Carmen spoke in detail about rumors circulating in the community that there was some organized crime connection to the murder. She says the GBI told her the murder bore the signature of a “Mexican Mafia” murder. The signs: An identifying tattoo on the accused, and more to the point, the specifics of the murder scene. Though there was no indication of sexual assault, her daughter’s underwear was removed and found hanging on a nearby tree, with the body lying next to the tree, Carmen said. She said the GBI characterized this gruesome sign as a characteristic of certain Mexico-based gangs, of which Rivera-Sanchez is allegedly a member.
However, in the same interview, Carmen said she believes Rivera-Sanchez allegedly killed her daughter primarily because he was interested in her romantically, and she rejected him.
Carmen said the GBI has been very forthcoming with her and told her about Rivera-Sanchez’s statements to law enforcement immediately after his arrest.
The suspect’s three stories
The GBI told Carmen that Rivera-Sanchez told multiple, somewhat contradictory stories about Mimi’s death:
- He saw who killed Mimi, but it wasn’t him;
- The killers seized both Rivera-Sanchez and Mimi, drove them away, then murdered her and released him;
- That he, Rivera-Sanchez, was the shooter, but he did so because he saw she was suffering, and he wanted her suffering to end.
Carmen said the GBI told her that Rivera-Sanchez initially declined an offer to speak with a lawyer and offered the three versions of his involvement without a lawyer present. He was subsequently able to lead the investigators to the site of the body, when he concluded, pointing at least to his presence at the crime scene, Carmen said.
The pain has not abated, but anger has
Carmen said she remains in perpetual pain, but that she is no longer angry with the defendant.
“I’m the type of person who can’t be angry, even (with) what he did,” she said. “I leave things in God’s hands.”
She added that she feels bad for Rivera-Sanchez’s family, as well as her own. “Sometimes I think that he destroyed my family, but he also destroyed his family,” she said. The one time Rivera-Sanchez was in court in person, for his arraignment, Carmen attended as well. She said, “I just looked at him….’Let me know why you [allegedly] did it,’” she thought.
Stumping for the President
In addition to her personal ideas, Rodriguez’s political ideas have also been affected by her awful experience. President Trump’s campaign learned of her plight and invited her to appear by Trump’s side in front of thousands at a Macon rally on November 3, 2024, two days before Trump’s re-election. She strongly endorsed the President as he stood by her side, and she told the boisterous crowd that he would protect Americans like her and her daughter.
In December, she further reflected, “I just think that…we can’t live with illegal immigrants, because they’re killing our children. “The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office has not answered phone calls inquiring about the defendant’s immigration status.
In Puerto Rico, Carmen could only vote in Territorial elections, but she has been able to vote in general elections in the years since she arrived on the U.S. mainland. She said she’s never missed one.
The ‘Good Immigrants’ should stay
She does take exception to the president’s policy of deporting hardworking, honest immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere. “I’m ok with (deporting) the illegal people, the bad people,” she said. “But right now they’re taking everyone…I’m disappointed with him on that…sending away hard workers” who work with produce and poultry—as she herself does on her Cornelia farm, raising 19,000 chickens at a time as a contractor with the Fieldale Corp. “The workers work hard and they support us.”
The long delay before trial
Finally, Carmen commented on what might seem an inordinate delay between the defendant’s arrest and his trial, currently scheduled to begin late in the spring; Rivera-Sanchez is not due in court until May 28th. She said the GBI told her there were two main reasons: there are more than 5,000 pages of evidence, she said—she doesn’t know exactly what’s in them—and he has changed attorneys twice. He initially hired a private attorney, but the Mountain Circuit Public Defender now has the case. Her understanding is that his family couldn’t afford the private legal fees, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, or more, in a murder defense.
Kimberly A. Williams, a spokesperson for the GBI. declined to comment when asked about Rodriguez’s comments for this story, as did Mountain Judicial Circuit District Attorney George Christian. A receptionist at the office of Rivera-Sanchez’s Public Defender defense attorney, Jeanne C. Tiger, said Tiger also could not comment.
As reported previously, Tiger has filed court motions to suppress statements Rivera-Sanchez may have made to the GBI, and also to rule out use of items as evidence taken under a search warrant from his home
A previous version of this article said the victim was pregnant when she was murdered; in fact, she had miscarried in June 2024, four months earlier. We regret the error.
