In Retrial, Man Convicted of Murder of Transgender Woman
The New York Times
Rasheen Everett strangled Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar in her Queens apartment. His 2013 conviction was thrown out because of a judge’s error.
For the second time, a Manhattan man has been found guilty in the 2010 murder of a transgender woman.
The man, Rasheen Everett, was first convicted in 2013 of murdering Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar, 29, but a mistake by the judge overseeing the case led an appeals court to toss the conviction in 2021, forcing prosecutors to retry the case.
On Thursday, a jury in Queens found Mr. Everett, 43, guilty of second-degree murder and of tampering with evidence. The killing was just one example of what the American Medical Association has declared an “epidemic” of violence against people who are transgender.
In a statement, the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said that prosecutors had been determined to pursue the case regardless of the years that had passed since Ms. Gonzalez-Andujar’s killing.
“Upon a reversal of a conviction through no fault of the prosecutors, my office built a strong case against this individual once again, and we successfully proved that he callously murdered a young woman 14 years ago,” Ms. Katz wrote.
On a March morning in 2010, Mr. Everett strangled Ms. Gonzalez-Andujar, who had advertised her services as a prostitute, in her apartment in Glendale, Queens. Then, prosecutors said, he doused her body in bleach in an attempt to destroy evidence of his crime and stayed in her apartment for more than a dozen hours. He also stole a camera, a laptop, a coat, a cellphone and keys from her apartment and fled to Las Vegas, according to prosecutors, where he was arrested days later. Prosecutors said that his DNA was found under Ms. Gonzalez-Andujar’s fingernails.
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