Relatives say Alesa Leach sought protection before police accused her ex-boyfriend in her death.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The arrest of a Jacksonville man in the death of 58-year-old Alesa Leach has deepened a family’s grief and sharpened questions about how a woman with a protection order could still end up dead months before a murder charge was filed.
Police say Joseph Anderson, 49, is charged in Leach’s killing after investigators spent nearly four months building the case. Leach’s relatives have described her as a mother of five who had lived through domestic violence and was trying to protect herself from a former partner. Their reaction has pushed the case beyond a routine arrest announcement, turning it into a story about loss, delayed justice and the limits of legal safeguards when violence continues despite an injunction.
Leach was found dead on Nov. 17, 2025, inside a home on West 14th Street near Myrtle Avenue, according to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Officers responding to the scene found her on a mattress and said she had died before help arrived. At first, the public record offered only the broad outline of a death investigation. Over time, investigators said they developed evidence placing Anderson in the home with Leach when she died. That evidence was not fully described in early public reports, and police have not publicly mapped out every moment leading up to her death. What became clear later was that Leach and Anderson had a history already known to the legal system. Detectives said Leach had an injunction against him, a detail that changed the meaning of the case for many people following it in Jacksonville.
The family’s account gave the story a second, more personal frame. First Coast News reported that Leach’s sons said she had been failed by the protections that were supposed to help keep her safe. Her son Titus Baxter said she “was let down by the system” because her life was still taken by a man she had protection against. Those comments were not broad political statements. They were the words of a son looking at the distance between a court order and real-world safety. Public writing from Leach years earlier also offered a glimpse into how she saw herself. In a 2019 post for a domestic violence support organization, she wrote about abuse, survival, motherhood and gratitude for her life. That earlier voice now sits in painful contrast with the way her life ended, and it helps explain why the case has struck such a deep emotional chord.
The legal timeline began to come into sharper focus Monday. News4JAX and other local outlets reported that Anderson was arrested in Connecticut on Dec. 5, 2025, on a warrant tied to an alleged violation of the injunction Leach had obtained. He was then extradited back to Jacksonville and held in the Duval County jail. While he remained in custody, investigators continued working the homicide case. On March 20, authorities obtained and served a separate warrant charging him with murder in Leach’s death. Officials have said he also faces additional related charges, though the earliest reports did not spell out each one. That sequence matters because it shows the homicide charge did not come immediately after Leach was found dead. Instead, the case appears to have moved in stages: the death scene, the injunction-violation arrest in another state, extradition, continued investigation and then the murder warrant months later.
That staggered timeline leaves several important unknowns. Police have not publicly detailed what physical evidence, statements or records they believe prove Anderson killed Leach. They also have not publicly said whether there were prior calls for service involving the pair, whether neighbors heard anything on the day Leach died, or whether prosecutors will argue there was a clear pattern of escalating behavior before the killing. Even so, the broad facts already released have made the case stand out. It involves a woman who had formal legal protection, a suspect who was later arrested outside Florida, and a family now speaking in public about what they see as a preventable death. In Jacksonville, where domestic violence cases often become visible only after the worst outcome, the Leach case has become a stark example of how those stories can unfold quietly before they explode into public view.
Leach’s relatives have kept the focus on who she was, not only on how she died. Reports describe her as a mother of five, and her own earlier writing described a life marked by hardship, faith and family. That personal history gives the case emotional weight that arrest records alone cannot carry. The image that emerges is of a woman who had already endured abuse and was still trying to live forward, only to become the center of a homicide investigation months later. The sheriff’s office has framed the case in criminal terms, but the family has framed it in human ones: a mother is gone, children are left mourning, and the order that was supposed to help did not stop the outcome they feared. Those two views now meet in court, where grief and procedure will move side by side.
Anderson remained jailed as of the latest reports, and future court hearings are expected to bring more detail about the charges and the evidence behind them. For now, the case stands at a painful midpoint: an arrest has been made, but the fuller public account of what happened to Leach on Nov. 17 has yet to be told in court.
Author note: Last updated March 24, 2026.