New Year’s Eve in Minneapolis should have felt like anticipation.
The streets were cold, the sky low and gray, but there was still that hum of people texting plans, booking rides, wondering what the next year might bring.
For 28-year-old realtor Monique Baugh, the day began like work and family and possibility, not like an ending.

She moved through the morning with the practiced rhythm of a woman used to balancing everything at once.
There were emails to answer, listings to check, and a calendar dotted with showings that didn’t pause just because the year was winding down.
At home, toys littered the living room floor, a small, beautiful mess made by two little girls who trusted that their mother would always come back.

Monique shared that home with her boyfriend, a local rapper known as Momoh.
To the outside world, he was a stage name and tracks on a playlist, but to her he was the man who helped tuck their daughters in at night.
They were not rich, not sheltered from struggle, but they had built something together that felt solid.

That morning, the girls toddled around in pajamas, one barely out of babyhood, the other still learning to form full sentences.
Monique kissed the top of their heads, breathing in the warm, familiar smell of their hair.
She told them she’d be back later, her voice light, never imagining how much that promise would haunt the hours to come.

Work did not stop for holidays, not really.
Clients still wanted to see houses, still wanted to talk numbers and neighborhoods and future plans.
When Monique told Momoh she had a house to show a prospective client later, it felt like just another part of the day.

The city moved on around them.
Cars slid carefully over patches of ice, breath hung in the air, and windows glowed with the first hints of evening.
No one looking at their small house on that block could see the violence already moving toward it.

According to the criminal complaint, he came wearing a black mask with two eye holes.
Cedric Berry, prosecutors would later say, stepped into the space that held a family’s entire world.
Behind that mask, they claimed, was a man who had already made a decision that would rip everything apart.

Inside the home, Momoh was not on a stage or in a studio.
He was just a father, just a man in sweatpants, surrounded by the sounds of his daughters’ voices and the quiet clutter of home.
When the door opened and Berry walked in, the normalcy of that afternoon cracked in an instant.

The complaint describes it like a sequence of facts.
Berry entered the residence that Monique and Momoh shared with their children, gun in hand.
He opened fire, shooting the rapper multiple times before fleeing.

Bullets tore through the air that had moments before held only cartoons and childhood.
The sound of gunfire filled the rooms where bedtime stories were usually whispered.
Somewhere in the chaos, the two little girls—ages 1 and 3—were present, their eyes wide, their minds unable to make sense of any of it.

Momoh went down hard, blood spilling across the bedroom floor.
He felt his body failing him, warmth leaving, pain overwhelming, the world dimming at the edges.
But through the haze, he saw his daughters.

They were there, near him, small hands reaching, voices confused.
He was a father first, even as he lay on the ground, covered in blood.
He understood in one terrible instant that if he did not survive, they would be alone with this memory.

He grabbed his phone.
Somehow, despite the damage, he dialed 911.
His words, halting and broken, carried both his own panic and the terror of a father desperate to protect his children.

Police responded quickly to the home.
They found Momoh on the floor of his bedroom, covered in blood, surrounded by his two daughters.
The image would stay with them—one man barely clinging to life, two little girls standing in a darkness they did not understand.

Paramedics moved fast.
They stabilized him, worked to stop the bleeding, and rushed him to the hospital.
Doctors would later say he was expected to recover from his physical injuries.

Recovery, though, is not just stitches and surgeries.
Recovery is waking up and remembering that your children saw you shot.
Recovery is realizing that the day is not over, and the person you love is still out in a world that just tried to erase you.

While he fought for his life, time moved relentlessly forward.
The clock did not pause for shock or grief.
It carried the day toward evening, toward darkness, toward the next act of violence.

Monique did not know the full details of what had happened when they last spoke.
She told him she had a house to show.
It was the kind of sentence that felt safe, ordinary, part of the daily language of a hardworking realtor.

She had been building a reputation.
Her name was beginning to be known not just as a friendly face, but as someone who got results.
She took pride in helping people find places to live, helping families step into homes where they could imagine a future.

But according to investigators, the “prospective client” she planned to meet was part of a trap.
Something about that showing was not what it seemed.
Somewhere between professionalism and trust, someone had laid out a path meant to lead her into danger.

The complaint would later outline a timeline with cold precision.
An hour after Momoh was shot, Monique was lured to another location.
By then, the violence had already begun to circle closer around her.

They say she was taken to an alley.
Not a grand, public street, but a tucked-away space, narrow and indifferent.
The kind of place where sound disappears quickly and witnesses are scarce.

When police later found her, her hands were bound with tape.
The detail sits heavily in the record—a simple, brutal fact.
It means she knew.

She knew she was not in control.
She knew someone had decided what would happen next, and it was not her.
She knew fear in a way that no one should.

She had lived a life full of choices.
Choices about work, about love, about how to raise her daughters and where to lay her head at night.
In that alley, someone tried to strip her of all of that.

She was shot three times.
The complaint does not embellish, does not assign drama or motive to those final seconds.
It simply documents the reality of what was done to her.

On December 31, 2019, while other people counted down to a new year, Monique’s life ended in the cold.
Emergency responders could not bring her back.
In a city full of fireworks, there was a family whose world had just gone dark.

Her daughters, 1 and 3 years old, would grow up with pictures instead of memories.
They would hear stories about their mother’s laugh, her drive, her kindness, her stubbornness.
They would be told that she loved them more than anything, even though they would never be able to remember her voice clearly.

Her colleagues in real estate mourned not just a professional, but a woman who had walked into rooms with confidence and care.
They remembered the way she balanced charm with competence, how clients trusted her because she listened.
They remembered the way she talked about her girls, how their names slipped into conversations as easily as property details.

In the weeks that followed, Minneapolis read about her death in headlines.
Monique Baugh, 28, respected realtor, killed on New Year’s Eve.
The articles mentioned her age, her job, the charges filed, and the fact that she left behind two young daughters.

They also mentioned Cedric Berry.
His name entered the public record as a defendant, a man charged with murder in connection with Monique’s death.
He was also charged with attempted murder for the earlier shooting of Momoh.

The criminal complaint laid out the sequence like a script.
Berry, in a black mask, entering the home.
Momoh attacked an hour before Monique was lured into the alley.

The complaint did not specify a motive.
It did not spell out why someone would orchestrate such a calculated day of violence.
It left a blank where “why” should have been.

For the legal system, that blank is a question to investigate.
For the family, it is a wound that may never close.
Why her, why them, why that day—these are questions that echo long after verdicts are read.

People speculated, because that is what people do in the face of senselessness.
They talked about grudges, jealousy, street tensions, money, music, old beefs and new threats.
But speculation never resurrects the dead, and it never fully explains why some lines are crossed.

What the complaint made clear is this:
Violence came to their home first, then followed her into her work.
It tried to wipe out both the man she loved and the woman she was.

Momoh survived his injuries.
He woke up in a hospital bed to a world forever changed.
His body still breathing, his heart still beating, but the center of his life gone.

He had two daughters looking up at him.
Two little girls who had seen too much and understood too little.
Two reasons to keep living in a world that had taken their mother.

Grief moved into the spaces Monique once filled.
It sat at the kitchen table, where her coffee cup used to be.
It lingered by the door she once walked through, key in hand, smile ready.

For her family, the trial and charges were necessary, but they were not a cure.
Justice, if it comes, cannot rewind December 31.
It cannot untape her hands, cannot pull the bullets back into the gun, cannot place her back into the life she was building.

Her daughters will one day grow old enough to ask specifics.
To want to know what happened, exactly, and why their mother did not come home that night.
Those conversations will require a kind of bravery different from any courtroom testimony.

In Minneapolis, alleys are still just alleys.
Houses are still shown by realtors with keys and clipboards and practiced smiles.
Fathers still sit on bedroom floors reading bedtime stories.

But somewhere in the city’s memory, there is a line drawn around that day.
Around the home where bullets tore through safety.
Around the alley where tape and gunfire tried to silence a woman whose life mattered.

Monique Baugh’s name lives now in two places at once.
In legal documents, as a victim of homicide.
And in the hearts of those who loved her, as a mother, a partner, a professional, a friend.

Her story is not just about the violence that ended her life.
It is also about the life she lived—full of work and laughter, of ambition and tenderness, of ordinary mornings that should have led to ordinary nights.
A life that should have crossed into a new year and kept going.

She did what so many of us do.
She went to work.
She answered a call.

She told the man she loved that she had a house to show.
She stepped into a car, into a day she thought she understood.
She did not know that someone else had written a different ending.

On that last day of 2019, a gunman tried to erase her.
But he could not erase the way her daughters will carry her forward.
He could not erase the way her name will continue to be spoken as a demand for justice and remembrance.

The complaint may not list a motive.
The pages may never fully explain why it happened.
But they do something else—they bear witness.

They say that on December 31, 2019, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a woman named Monique Baugh was taken from this world by violence she did not choose.
They say that a man survived what was meant to kill him, left to raise the daughters they brought into the world together.
And they say, in their own cold way, that her story deserves to be told, not only for what was done to her, but for who she was before anyone pulled a trigger.