Jessica Chambers made national headlines after being burned alive on a back road in Panola County, Mississippi, and the man indicted for her murder sits in the Ouachita Correctional Center.
His name is Quinton Tellis, and investigators think he’s tied to another murder here in Northeast Louisiana.
But her story has been overlooked.
Her name is Meing-Chen Hsiao, but her friends knew her as Mandy.
Monroe resident, Connie Griffith met Mandy with other international students at the Wesley Foundation at ULM about a year ago.
“She told me one time that she really wasn’t happy living in the dorm and so then I showed her this camper, and then later, you know since she seen it she thought about it and she said she did want to move here and try that,” says Griffith.
Griffith says Mandy was very independent, enjoying being on her own and making the culture that she was surrounded by her own.
“I think that’s one of the main things that you know, I want to tell people about Mandy is that maybe she was a little too trusting. And I know a lot of the international students they’ll kind of you know, hang together, be roommates together and you know, talk in their native language. In a way, they protected and helped each other where she kind of missed out on some of that protection,” says Griffith.
Mandy moved out of the camper because of lack of transportation.
“I mean I just remember her calling me pretty often, you know saying can you help me with this? Can you give me this ride?” says Griffith.
As a student working on receiving her masters in education, she needed to be closer to the ULM campus.
“Because she had been a teacher she carried candy around with her sometimes,” says Griffith.
Both Griffith and investigators say that this is the street that Mandy would ride her bike down, passing out candy to children. They say this is where she would meet Quinton Tellis.
“Some of the parents or step parents you know were there and one of them was a man that she met that gave her a ride,” says Griffith.
Mandy was found stabbed to death in her apartment August 9th of 2015.
But Griffith wants to reflect on the positive memories of Mandy, a woman who love to travel the world.
“They were paying for jobs in Australia. So, she got a job there, it was actually just farm work but you know, she was willing to try all kinds of new things,” says Griffith.
Falling in love with a man named Steven who introduced her to Christ and the Christian faith.
“Her visa ran out so she had to leave the country and then a really tragic thing that happened to her, she stayed in contact with him and his family but she found out he was in a car accident and died. Whenever life was really hard for her she would say, I just want to go to heaven and see Steven,” says Griffith.
