I welcomed my daughter’s boyfriend into our home. Then he committed the most evil act of betrayal

‘I begged her not to go that day,’ Lisa Brock tells the Daily Mail, choking back tears.

‘In my stomach I just didn’t feel good about it.’

Brock’s daughter Alexis Maki, a 24-year-old college student adored by her friends and family and with her whole life ahead of her, had recently broken up with her boyfriend of two years, Emmet Metzger.

That morning on November 4, 2023, Metzger had shown up at the bar in New Baden, Illinois, where she worked, and is said to have violently attacked one of her male coworkers in a jealous rage.

Hours later, he told Alexis he would finally move out of the apartment they shared – but asked her to come over so he could see their dog Echo one final time.

‘He knew the way to her heart was through her animals,’ Brock says.

Despite her mom’s pleas, Alexis went to meet him – believing the man she had loved would never hurt her. Brock went with her daughter, waiting in the car outside to provide support.

Only a few minutes had passed before several police cars came screaming down the road.

Metzger, now 27, had shot his ex-girlfriend multiple times in the neck, chest, shoulder and hip.

He then placed a chilling 911 call confessing to her horrific murder.

‘I f***ed up,’ he told the dispatcher. ‘I did something so bad. I shot my girlfriend. I need to be arrested, please.’

While cops raced to the scene, Metzger walked over the road to the New Baden police precinct and turned himself in.

Outside the apartment, Brock waited for what felt like hours before she was told that her worst fears had come true: her daughter had been murdered by a man they had welcomed into their family.

‘At one time, we trusted him with our daughter and we did think of him as family,’ Brock says.

‘He was with us when I lost my mom in February of the same year… he was right there when my mom passed away.

‘How could you just put the family through more, plus do that to my daughter?… I just don’t know how you go from saying you love someone to killing them.’

She adds: ‘It was the worst day of my life. Except the days continued.’

That’s because, despite confessing immediately to the heinous crime – and surveillance footage capturing the murder on camera – Metzger pleaded not guilty, putting Alexis’ family through 17 months of grueling court hearings.

Finally, this April, he changed his plea to guilty of first-degree murder, and he’ll be sentenced in June.

While this doesn’t bring Brock any closure, she says she ‘was glad to hear him say the words that he was guilty… I just needed to hear that… for him to admit what he did.’

After his sentencing, she hopes she will never again have to come face-to-face with the man she ‘trusted with my daughter’ – only for him to commit the ultimate betrayal.

Alexis and Metzger first met when they started working together at the Grit and Tonic bar, Brock says.

They were friends for about two years before they began dating.

Soon, Metzger became part of Alexis’ family, with Brock, Alexis’ dad Gregory and sister Savannah all welcoming him with open arms.

‘He was always very nice and helpful,’ Brock recalls, adding that there was nothing that set off alarm bells.

‘We didn’t see any other side.’

They were just like any other young couple. They adopted a dog named Echo together and Metzger moved into Alexis’ apartment in New Baden.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2023 that the first signs of Metzger’s abuse began to surface, Brock says.

‘They went on vacation that June and he called her the c-word in an argument and she said, “I just can’t get past it,”’ she says.

‘That was the beginning of the end, I think, for her and she just saw more of a horrible side of him… it just happened so fast.’

Four months after the vacation, that October, Alexis asked him to move out of the apartment – but he refused to leave.

It was only after the break-up that the family began to learn more about Metzger’s dark side.

‘I don’t know how much she didn’t tell me. I think her friends knew a lot more than I did,’ Brock says. 

What she did learn was that Metzger had tried to isolate Alexis from her friends and wouldn’t let them come to see her at the apartment.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, Brock says she also noticed the 24-year-old’s confidence waning, ‘like he was dimming her light.’

The situation reached a head on the morning of November 4, 2023.

Brock remembers her daughter waking her up sometime in the early hours with her friend and coworker Giovanni Venuti standing bloodied and beaten in Brock’s home.

Venuti had always been ‘crazy’ about Alexis but they were just close friends, Brock says.

It was around 4.20am when Maki, Venuti and another colleague had been leaving the bar at the end of their shifts.

Venuti was sitting in the passenger seat in Maki’s car in the parking lot when Metzger suddenly showed up.

According to a police report, the jealous ex reached through the car window and began punching Venuti in the face, leaving him covered in blood and with a chipped tooth.

Officers from the Lebanon Police Department responded to the scene but Metzger had already fled.

Police did not go to Metzger’s home to question him. Instead, an incident report shows Lebanon Police arranged a time with Metzger – 6pm that night – to come in for an interview.

Brock reveals her daughter had also contacted Clinton County Police to get a restraining order against her ex – but she was told to come back Monday.

Both the police interview and a potential restraining order would ultimately come too late. 

For the next 12 hours, Metzger remained free – free to murder the woman he claimed to have loved.

He was finally charged with felony battery over the attack on Venuti three months after Maki’s death. 

Brock feels her daughter was let down by police – and that things could have turned out very differently if her soon-to-be killer had been arrested that day.

‘They didn’t do anything right,’ she says.

The Daily Mail has contacted both the Lebanon Police Department and the Clinton County Police Department for comment.

Following the assault on her friend, Alexis had stayed at her mom’s home.

Then, while Metzger was at work, Brock says she and Alexis went to the former couple’s apartment and picked up her beloved pets: Echo the dog and two cats, Scout and Honey.

The apartment had been set up with cameras so that Alexis could check on her pets while she was out – but Brock says Metzger had turned the internet off that day so the cameras weren’t working.

When the mom and daughter left with the pets, Brock says Alexis made the decision to turn it back on, as she feared Metzger might return and trash her apartment.

She says Metzger had no idea that the internet – and the cameras – were back on to capture what he was about to do.

Later that day, Metzger contacted Alexis and told her he was packing up his stuff and leaving – but wanted to see Echo one last time.

‘I begged her not to go and she’s like, “Mom he’s not gonna hurt me.”’

She adds: ‘He just played on her heart, on her selflessness, her kindness.’

Brock says her daughter didn’t want her to come up to the apartment with her so she waited in the car.

‘She took the dog upstairs and she texted me at like 4.17pm, “So far so good. He’s just finishing packing I think because he went into the bedroom.” 

‘That’s when he got the gun and three minutes later, she was gone.’

The cameras captured Metzger emerging from the bedroom with a gun, cursing and opening fire on Alexis as she sat on the sofa.

When she first saw police cars arriving on the scene, Brock thought it must have been Alexis who called 911.

She rushed to the officers telling them: ‘My daughter is upstairs.’

Soon, however, she learned the heartbreaking truth about what had happened.

To this day, she wishes she had gone up to the apartment with Alexis.

‘But the police said, “He would have killed you too”‘ – leaving her youngest daughter Savannah without a sister and a mother.

In a way, Brock adds, the family feels like they lost two loved ones that day.

‘He was part of our family for a while,’ she says.

‘We treated him like that and so… it would be easier to understand, maybe, if a stranger did it, but not someone that we knew and loved and trusted. That’s hard.’

Alexis’ family members weren’t the only people shocked by Metzger’s actions.

Coworkers at the bar, friends and anyone else who knew the 27-year-old have also told Brock they’d ‘never have guessed he could do this’.

At his sentencing, Brock hopes the judge will make sure her daughter’s killer will never be free to tear any other families apart.

‘I just want him not to be able to get out. I don’t want him to hurt someone else,’ she says.

She adds: ‘Sometimes I feel like it’s just a waste of another life… [and] it feels like we’re serving his sentence together because I’m having to live with this pain for the rest of my life.’

Brock hopes the sentencing will give the family a chance to ‘put him behind us’ so they can focus on ‘learning how to live without Alexis, how to survive.’

Though she doesn’t ‘even know where to start,’ Brock plans to deliver a victim impact statement to pay tribute to her daughter.

‘I could write a book about Alexis. She was the best,’ she says.

At the time of her murder, Alexis was studying radiology at Kaskaskia College in Illinois, while working at Grit and Tonic part time. She graduated from the college posthumously in May.

As well as being a ‘proud pet parent,’ the 24-year-old was known for always putting others before herself.

While at Wesclin High School, she had been part of a peer-support suicide and crisis prevention group called ‘Lifesavers’, where she helped other teens going through difficulties.

She had also gone on a mission trip to Jamaica with her mom where they had helped in an orphanage.

It was only after her death that Brock says she learned quite how many lives her daughter had touched.

‘She was the best child… just the sweetest,’ she says.

‘After she passed I found out how many people that her life impacted. One girl reached out… and she said Alexis got her through some hard times… Like she just changed her life.’

Brock says: ‘She had the best heart… I just had no idea how many people knew her and just loved her so much.

‘I mean, I knew I thought she was awesome and special but I didn’t know how many other people did.’

Looking back now, Brock believes Metzger saw Alexis as his possession.

‘I think he saw her as something that wasn’t love at all. It was just something that he owned.’

And the devastated mom shares a message for others living in abusive relationships.

‘If you are in that type of situation, just don’t stay… don’t ever ignore your gut feeling because it’s really telling you something.’

She adds: ‘I never thought it would be me or her or us.’

The national domestic abuse helpline offers support on 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)