Rehoboth, Massachusetts, August 6–7, 2025 an eighteen-year-old sent her sister a text message that read “if I die, it was Greg” with her phone at four percent battery. Two weeks later, investigators found her body in a five-foot grave on her boyfriend’s twenty-five-acre property. She had been right.

The Last Text

On her TikTok, she posted videos announcing her pregnancy and described Groom as a man who treated her like “gold.”

That was before August 6. That was before she took a rideshare to his house on County Street in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and walked through the door and into whatever happened next.

Kylee Monteiro was eighteen years old. She had just graduated from Attleboro High School. She was eleven weeks pregnant pregnant with Gregory Groom’s child, a fact she had shared publicly, on social media, with the openness of a young woman who was happy about it and wanted people to know. She had grown up in Burrillville, Rhode Island, and had known Groom, who was twenty-two, for long enough to describe him in public posts as someone who treated her the way a person should be treated.

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She had just left a residential program the nature of which was not disclosed in public court proceedings and had taken a rideshare to Groom’s home at 107 County Street in Rehoboth on August 6, looking to stay with him.

What happened that evening, according to prosecutors, was an argument. What followed the argument, according to Kylee’s own words transmitted at almost the last moment her phone had power, was violence.

Investigators learned from Faith Monteiro that the night her sister arrived at Groom’s house, Kylee texted Faith, saying that Groom “threw me on the ground and pulled my hair and strangled her.”

Her phone was at four percent battery. She had time for one more message.

“My phone is at 4% and if I die, it was Greg.”

She was right.

August 7: The Report

Groom reported Monteiro missing to Rehoboth police on August 8. The story he told officers was that they had argued, she had walked down the driveway, and she had not been seen since. He described an argument and a departure. He did not describe what prosecutors would later say actually happened.

The Rehoboth Police Department and the Massachusetts State Police began investigating Kylee’s disappearance. Faith Monteiro Kylee’s sister, the one who had received the texts gave investigators the messages. The “if I die, it was Greg” text was now in police hands.

Groom was interviewed. Groom admitted that he had knocked Monteiro to the ground, causing her to hit her head. This was a partial admission an acknowledgment of physical contact that fell well short of what prosecutors would allege had actually happened.

A subsequent search of Groom’s property on August 14, which included cadaver dogs, failed to yield anything of significance. The dogs found nothing. The property at 107 County Street in Rehoboth about 26 acres of woods, much of it undeveloped, according to Faith did not give up what it was holding.

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Kylee’s family was searching. They were driving around. They were desperately trying to find her. The family tried to get in touch with Monteiro to move her to a safer location but she replied that she was “attempting to continue to stay at Mr. Groom’s residence,” this was in the period between the texts and her disappearance, in the hours when she was still alive and still at the property and her family was trying to reach her.

She was on the property when her family was trying to get to her. She was alive when the cadaver dogs searched. She was alive for how long, exactly, prosecutors would establish through Groom’s own eventual confession while investigators were still treating this as a missing persons investigation.

The Confession and the Map

Several days later, Groom went to the police station for an interview, where he admitted that during an argument with Monteiro, he pushed her, causing her to fall back and hit her head. Police continued to press Groom about where Monteiro was and told him they had obtained a search warrant and would “dig if necessary.”

Groom paused, according to officials, and then voluntarily drew a map showing that their argument took place behind a shed on his property.

The map was not an admission of murder. It was the moment before an admission the moment when the story shifted from “she walked away” to “something happened behind the shed.”

Then, in the interrogation, it shifted further.

He told police that he stabbed Monteiro once in the chin, once in the neck, once in the head and once in the chest. Police said after the stabbing, Groom went 20 yards into the woods and dug a five-foot-deep hole, where he put her body and covered it with brush. He also covered the site of the murder with brush.

According to prosecutors, Groom eventually told investigators he killed Monteiro after the argument on August 6 behind a shed on the property. He stabbed Monteiro twice in the neck and once in the chest with a kitchen knife, causing the blade to break.

The knife blade broke inside her body. He had stabbed her with enough force that the blade of a kitchen knife fractured on contact.

Groom then allegedly told police that he buried her about 20 yards away. He had spent several hours, according to his own account, digging. He had dug a five-foot hole. He had put Kylee Monteiro and their unborn child in it and covered them with brush. And then he had gone to the police station and reported her missing.

The Body

Police and medical examiners used the map to search the property and uncovered a body “consistent with Kylee Monteiro.”

She was found on the evening of August 19, 2025. She had been in the ground since the night of August 6 or the early hours of August 7 nearly two weeks. She had been eleven weeks pregnant.

Groom was arrested on August 19. He was charged with murder and witness intimidation. He was held without bail.

He pleaded not guilty.

Who Kylee Was

Kylee Monteiro was described by everyone who spoke publicly about her in the same terms warm, spunky, loyal, the kind of person who showed up for other people.

“Kylee was very spunky. She loved her family,” said family friend Donna Hopkins. “Kylee was always there for everybody. It didn’t matter who it was.”

She had graduated from Attleboro High School. She was eighteen years old just barely, in the way that eighteen-year-olds are just barely adults, old enough to make choices and not always experienced enough to know which choices carry which risks. She had been publicly happy about her pregnancy. She had announced it on TikTok. She had, in the way of young people who document their lives online, created a public record of a version of herself and her relationship that did not include whatever was happening privately.

Her sister Faith’s early public statements were protective of Groom “I know there’s been a lot of speculation of domestic abuse but that wasn’t the case in their relationship,” Faith said in the days after Kylee’s disappearance, before the full picture had emerged. Faith was scared. Faith was searching. Faith had received the text messages and had not yet fully processed what they meant. When the body was found and the confession came, the understanding of what the relationship had actually been changed everything.

Faith has since committed to establishing a nonprofit called The Kylee Project, which will advocate for and support victims of domestic violence.

The Text Before the End

The detail that defines the Kylee Monteiro case the one that will not leave is the text message.

She was eighteen years old and her phone was dying and she knew what was happening to her and she had just enough battery to tell her sister who was responsible. Four percent. She knew that was not enough for a long message or a phone call or a detailed account. She had time for a sentence.

“My phone is at 4% and if I die, it was Greg.”

She was right about the four percent. She was right about dying. She was right about Greg.

That text message is evidence. It is also something more than evidence it is an eighteen-year-old girl’s last act of agency, the one thing she could do in a situation where she had almost no power left: get the information out. Tell someone. Make sure someone knew.

She knew the information would outlast her phone battery. She knew, perhaps, that it would outlast her. She sent it anyway.

The investigators who read that text message were the ones who kept pushing. Who told Groom they would dig. Who watched him pause and then watched him draw the map. Who followed the map into the woods and found her.

She sent the message. They found her. The message did the work she needed it to do.

Gregory Groom

Gregory Groom was twenty-two years old at the time of Kylee’s death. He had known Kylee long enough that she had described him publicly as treating her like gold. Whatever had been true when she wrote those posts was not true on August 6, 2025.

He was charged with murder and witness intimidation. The witness intimidation charge reflects conduct that occurred in the period between Kylee’s death and Groom’s arrest conduct that investigators allege amounted to an attempt to prevent witnesses from cooperating with the investigation.

He was indicted on both charges in November 2025. He was arraigned in Fall River Superior Court in November 2025. He pleaded not guilty to both charges. He remains held without bail.

He had confessed to investigators had drawn the map, had described the stabbing, had described the digging. Whether his not-guilty plea represents a legal strategy involving that confession’s admissibility, or a disavowal of the facts as prosecutors characterised them, or something else, is a matter for the proceedings that lie ahead.

He is twenty-two years old. He will stand trial for stabbing his pregnant girlfriend, burying her in a five-foot grave on his property, reporting her missing to police, and then waiting nearly two weeks while investigators searched for her and she was in the ground.

The Property and the Search

The property at 107 County Street in Rehoboth is twenty-five to twenty-six acres of largely undeveloped woodland. The cadaver dogs searched it on August 14 and found nothing. This is not necessarily a failure of the dogs cadaver dogs, operating in thick woodland in the heat of a New England August, working in terrain that includes dense brush over a concealed grave, can miss. The fact that the dogs found nothing did not mean Kylee was not there.

She was there.

She was twenty yards from the shed where she was killed, in a five-foot hole Groom had dug with his own hands, covered with brush, on property his family owned. The dogs did not find her because she was covered and concealed with the specific intent of not being found.

She was found because investigators kept pressing, and because Groom eventually broke, and because the map he drew on the table at the police station was accurate enough for investigators to follow it into the woods on the evening of August 19 and find what was there.

Faith and The Kylee Project

Faith Monteiro Kylee’s sister, the one who received the four-percent text has been the public face of the family since her sister’s death. She spoke at vigils. She talked to reporters. She sat through the arraignment. She listened to prosecutors describe, in open court, what had been done to her sister and their niece or nephew.

Her family is working to launch a nonprofit called The Kylee Project, which will advocate for and support victims of domestic violence.

The project’s existence planned in the weeks after Kylee’s body was found represents the specific form of grief that produces action: the determination to make the loss mean something beyond itself, to use the worst thing that has happened as the foundation for preventing the same thing from happening to someone else.

Faith received a text message from her sister that ended with four percent. She did not know, when she read it, what it would cost her, or what she would be asked to do with it. She knows now.

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More than 100 people gathered at vigils in Rehoboth and in Burrillville, Rhode Island, where Kylee had grown up, to remember a young woman who had announced her pregnancy on TikTok and been happy about it, who had sent her sister a text at four percent battery, and who had been right.

A Note on the Charges

Gregory Groom has been charged with murder and witness intimidation. He has pleaded not guilty. The case is proceeding through the Massachusetts courts. Nothing in this article should be taken as a legal determination of guilt that determination is for the jury at trial.

What the public record establishes is this: Groom confessed to investigators. He drew a map. The map led to Kylee Monteiro’s body. Kylee’s own text message, sent when she was alive and her phone was at four percent, named him.

The trial will determine what the law makes of those facts.

Kylee Monteiro was eighteen years old. She had just graduated from high school. She was eleven weeks pregnant. She sent a text at four percent battery naming the person she feared would kill her. She was found in a five-foot grave on a twenty-five-acre property in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, on the evening of August 19, 2025. Her case is pending trial. The Kylee Project, a nonprofit in her name, is being established to support victims of domestic violence.