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Before her death, a Camden woman sent a text saying she feared that her boyfriend would hurt her

“If anything happens to me, Kacheim Davis sent people to my house to hurt me,” Christine Pierce wrote in a text to a family member the day before she was murdered, a prosecutor told a judge Friday.

A Camden County Police Department vehicle parked in Camden in November.
A Camden County Police Department vehicle parked in Camden in November.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer

The day before she was killed in her Camden apartment, Christine Pierce texted a relative, saying she feared her boyfriend. “If anything happens to me, Kacheim Davis sent people to my house to hurt me,” she wrote.

Her words were prescient, a prosecutor told a judge Friday at a detention hearing for Davis, who now stands charged with murder.

The text message Pierce sent was an “ominous premonition” of what happened the next day, Assistant Prosecutor Peter Gallagher told Camden County Superior Court Judge David Ragonese.

Authorities say Davis, 31, of Camden, fatally stabbed Pierce on Jan. 30 after an argument.

Davis’ attorney, Igor Levenberg, told the judge Davis had no motive to kill Pierce, 41, and that there was no direct evidence linking him to the slaying. He said Davis is married and referred to Pierce as his mistress. Levenberg contended that Davis’ wife, who he said knew about her husband’s relationship, had a motive to kill Pierce.

The judge, however, found that authorities had established probable cause that Davis killed Pierce and ordered that he remain in custody because he had failed to appear in court 14 times in unrelated criminal cases and because he now faces a murder charge.

Gallagher told the judge that about four hours before Pierce was killed, she had flagged down police officers outside her apartment on the 800 block of Haddon Avenue, telling them that during an argument, Davis had pushed her out of her apartment and locked the door. In handling that complaint, officers approached Davis and their body-worn cameras captured what he was wearing, Gallagher said.

Pierce was found dead later that night after firefighters responded to a smoke alarm at her apartment. They found a small fire on the stove and Pierce unresponsive in a bedroom with a stab wound to her back.

Surveillance cameras in the neighborhood captured a man walking north on that block of Haddon about 10 minutes before firefighters arrived, Gallagher said. The man in the video was wearing clothing that matched what Davis had worn earlier that day, he said.

At the time of Pierce’s slaying, the prosecutor said, Davis was awaiting trial for assaulting her about a year earlier.