On a Friday night in November 2022, outside a small neighborhood store in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, a routine stop turned into a deadly encounter for Reginal Che Xou. He was a 33-year-old Guatemalan male who had come to the United States and settled in Hazlehurst, building a life that bridged his adopted town in Copiah County and the rural community of Senimla ha in San Pedro Carchá, Guatemala, where his family and childhood memories were rooted.
That night, November 18, 2022, Reginal was among three men outside the North End Store, a modest convenience stop just off U.S. Highway 51. According to Hazlehurst Police Chief Derrick Cubit, the men were confronted during an armed robbery. In the chaos, one of the victims tried to fight back, turning a tense robbery into a brief, violent struggle. Gunfire broke the quiet around the store, and in the confusion of those moments, Reginal was shot. Officers and emergency responders could do nothing for him; he died at the scene, his final moments spent in the parking lot of the store he had likely visited many times.
Investigators later recorded the location of the killing as the Northend Quick Stop on Caldwell Drive, classifying the incident as an armed robbery with injury and death. His body was sent to the Mississippi State Crime Lab for an autopsy, a clinical step that stood in stark contrast to the shock and grief spreading through Hazlehurst’s close-knit community and through the network of family and friends who knew him far beyond Mississippi’s borders. Local news reports described the crime in spare, factual language, but behind those lines was a man whose name quickly joined the somber roll of gun violence victims from Hazlehurst, listed among others on memorial sites that insist these are “real people, not just statistics.”
In the days that followed, mourners gathered at Asambleas de Dios Torre Fuerte, the Spanish-language congregation in Hazlehurst where his visitation and service were held. Obituaries from the local funeral home and their partner memorial pages recorded some of the details that the crime reports did not: Reginal was engaged to Maria Adelaida Agustin Matias, and he was a father to four sons—Edy Marco Antonio, Erik Damian, Roky Reginaldo, and Misael Daniel—each of them living in Hazlehurst and now facing a future marked by the absence of their father. Friends and relatives shared condolences and memories online, while, back in Guatemala, a community announcement marked the arrival of his body and its journey home for burial, a final return across borders that underscored how far his life had traveled before it was cut short.
For the police, the case opened as a homicide born of an armed robbery—a crime that might have lasted only minutes but left a permanent mark. Publicly available accounts indicate that investigators asked anyone with information about the robbery and shooting to come forward, publishing the Hazlehurst Police Department’s phone number and appealing to the community for help. As time has passed, however, no subsequent news reports have detailed any named suspects, arrests, charges, or court proceedings connected to Reginal’s death. In the record that remains, his story ends on that November night outside the North End Store: a working man, a fiancé, and a father, killed during a robbery, with the official narrative closing not with a conviction but with an unresolved plea for answers.
