Jeffrey Caplan
The mother of a transgender teen who was brutally murdered in March 2016 wants the alleged killers to get the death penalty.
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Katrina Johnson said she wants to sit next to the parents of the two suspects while they are executed. Kendarie Johnson, 16, was found dead in an alley in Burlington, Iowa, after allegedly being asked to join two men, Jorge Sanders-Galvez, 23, and his cousin Jaraon Purham, 25, for a threesome.
The men allegedly believed that Johnson, who also went by the name Kandicee and identified as both male and female, was a woman. Johnson was born male, and when the two men discovered that fact, prosecutors say they murdered him.
“If they are indicted on a hate crime, the death penalty is a possibility of punishment,” Katrina Johnson told the Des Moines Register. “And as harsh as it may sound, I would love to sit side-by-side with their parents and watch their children die.”
Johnson, described as a popular high school student by locals, would switch between male and female names and identify as either gender.
Sanders-Galvez persuaded Johnson to get in his car, then brought Johnson to a home to have sex with him and Purham, according to federal prosecutor Christopher Perras, whom Attorney General Jeff Sessions assigned to the case.
In a court document, Perras wrote that Sanders-Galvez became enraged when he discovered that Johnson was biologically male. The cousins, Perras said, “over the next hour suffocated Kedarie by stuffing a rag down his throat and wrapping a plastic bag around his head.”
They then “threw him in their car, drove to another part of town, dumped him in an alley and shot him several times until he bled to death,” Perras wrote.
