Deka Simmons, 40, was no stranger to violence and murder when she shot 48-year-old Daxcimo Ceja, 48, to death in a garage in Colorado Springs. After that, she dismembered his body, got a friend to help her clean the area, and dumped his body in a drainage culvert, where it wouldn’t be found for years. But why did she do it?
The answer involves what prosecutors would later call an obsession with child molesters and a woman who has no qualms about murder.
We don’t know a lot about Simmons’ past, but we do know her first arrest happened in 2002 in Colorado Springs when she was just 18 years old. She was arrested on charges of third-degree assault with a deadly weapon and felony menacing. She would go on to have seven charges relating to weapons.
Also in 2002: She would get her first first-degree murder charge, which would later be dismissed. She would get charged with first-degree murder two more times. The next charge would be for allegedly being involved in the shooting murder of Donna Oliveto, an inmate who was with Simmons in the El Paso County jail. The third charge? Daxcimo Ceja. We’ll get to that in a minute.
What prompted Deca Simmons’ second murder?
Per the arrest affidavit, Simmons and her then-boyfriend Jeff Hoskins were at the house of victim Oliveto. They smoked “an overabundance of meth,” per a Facebook post from Oliveto’s son’s mother, and became extremely paranoid that Oliveto was an informant for the police and could testify against Simmons in an upcoming attempted murder trial (Simmons is a career criminal).
“These two individuals had no regard for Donna, her son or any relationship that Donna had in this world. My son lost his mother that day, Her family lost a wonderful daughter, sister and aunt.”
“I guess she was an agent,” Simmons would tell a friend after the murder. She then stole Oliveto’s Pontiac Grand-Am. Because her boyfriend was the one who pulled the trigger, Simmons was only sentenced to 12 years. In jail, she kept up her violent streak. She was twice charged with assault, including assaulting an officer in 2004, adding an extra two years to her sentence. In total, she had 35 prison incidents between 2004 and 2015.
When she got out of prison in 2017, she went right back to her old ways and violated her probation when her probation officer found a pair of brass knuckles and a knife in her motel room, thus bringing her back to jail for two years. She was released in 2019 but then she was arrested again after a fight with her stepfather involving the custody of her daughter. This is where her “obsession” with child molesters started to reach huge proportions.
That “fight” with her stepfather was reportedly because she thought he was molesting her five-year-old daughter. She stabbed him and back to prison she went, this time for second-degree assault. She told her cellmate that she had previously killed another man because she thought he was a child molester. If you’re keeping track that’s four murders, but police think that’s not all.
This brings us to Ceja.
What did Daxcimo Ceja do?
We don’t know a ton about him we do know that he was a sex offender in California and that there was a warrant out for his arrest for failure to register in Colorado Springs. He allegedly had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old when he was either 19 or 25 (there are conflicting reports about his age).
This brings us to Feb. 16, 2022. Court documents didn’t reveal the nature of Ceja’s relationship with Simmons. We’re not sure exactly how they met, whether they were friends or acquaintances, but they were together in a garage at 317 W. Harrison St. on that fateful day.
Per the testimony of the owner of the garage, who also happened to be Simmons’ roommate, Simmons came to the roommate’s house with Ceja with no warning, for a drug deal. She then brought both of them to the garage, where she pulled out a weapon she always carried on her: A .357-caliber handgun. She shot Ceja three times in the head.
Why didn’t the witness go to the police? Because Simmons told her if she ever breathed a word of what happened, she would come back and murder her and her son. “I’m so scared,” the woman told detectives during a three-hour interview. “Please don’t tell [Simmons].”
After Ceja was shot, Simmons cut up the body and drove it away in a van. On Feb. 20, four days after the murder, she sent a Facebook message to the witness that said, “DID YOU CLEAN THE HOUSE???”
Authorities would later find traces of Ceja’s DNA in the garage, even though it was “cleaned” thoroughly.
The witness said that she didn’t want to bring in any “cleaners” from anywhere else because that would mean there would be “too many loose ends.” Regardless, Simmons was arrested on April 7 on suspicion of the murder, even though authorities had no idea where to find the body. That changed on Oct. 5, 2023.
Someone called the Colorado Springs Police Department Communications Center anonymously and said there were human remains stuffed in a bag and dropped into a drainage culvert around the 500 block of West Polk Street. They followed up and found the body parts.
Just six days later, the Coroner’s Office identified the loose remains as Ceja’s. During Simmons’ murder trial, prosecutor Sharon Flaherty cited Simmons’ “unrestrained hatred for anyone who would molest a child,” calling it a “fixation” and “paranoia.”
Simmons’ lawyer said she couldn’t have done the crime because none of her DNA was found at the scene, to which prosecutors countered that it was probably cleaned out of the garage. After closing arguments, jurors deliberated for seven hours before reaching a verdict of guilty for first-degree murder.
After the verdict, prosecutor Jennifer Viehman said she couldn’t put into words “the relief I have for this [Ceja’s] family. It really has been a long road, there really have been a lot of hurdles. … What this family had to endure is unimaginable.”
In Colorado, a first-degree murder conviction requires a life sentence without parole. Simmons was also found guilty of tampering with a body as well as physical evidence. She was given 24 years and three years for those charges.
Ceja’s parents spoke before Simmons was sentenced. “(Ceja) was killed for something he did 24 years ago,” his mother Karen Fancher said. “She won’t be on the street to hurt anyone else’s families like she has done her whole entire life.”
His father, Barry Joseph Fancher, called his son a “good person” who “didn’t deserve to go out this way.”