Angie Zapata Update and Tiffany Berry's Murderer Kills Again
Helen G posts that Allan Andrade appeared in Weld District Court to hear the charges filed against him:
Mr Andrade is charged with first-degree murder, felony bias-motivated crime, felony motor vehicle theft and felony identity theft.
First, I hope that murder charge sticks. The fact that he hung around all day waiting to ask Angie if she was trans so he’d know that it was okay to murder strikes me as extremely premeditated. Helen has some words about the identity theft charge:
Wait, what? “Identity theft“? I do not even begin to understand the twisted logic of someone who would apparently murder a trans woman in cold blood because he did not approve of her identity – and then proceed to steal that same identity while she lay dead from the blunt-force trauma that he is believed to have dealt her.
The Greeley Tribune has the story here. We have a court date as well:
Allen Andrade, 31, charged with first-degree murder of transgender 18-year-old Angie Zapata, will appear in Weld District Court at 11:30 a.m. Aug. 26.
Read Helen’s post – I agree with all of it and can’t say any of it better right now.
Nia posts at Feministe and on her own blog:
You can support the family by making contributions to Angie Zapata’s memorial fund!
Please make donation checks payable to Monica Murquia (Angie’s sister) and mail them to the Colorado Anti-Violence Program at P.O. Box 181085, Denver, CO 80218.
Monica Roberts posts that the man who was charged with murdering Tiffany Berry on February 16, 2006, and was out on the streets on a $20,000 bail, murdered his two-year old daughter.
Police say, at the time of this arrest, Blake was out on a $20,000 bond for a Second Degree Murder charge for an incident that happened in February of 2006.
This is the consequence as treating some people as disposable, as not worthy of life. The people who kill us, who receive a slap on the wrist because killing trans women is “understandable” and can be “sympathized with” are murderers. They kill human beings – trans women, their own daughters. If you let them walk the streets because they kill someone you approve of killing, their next victim may be not be so convenient to you.
As Monica says:
TransGriot Note: As Dr. King stated, we are in an inescapable network of mutuality. For those of you who continue to ignore the fact that transgender people are part of the human family and that crimes committed against us should get the same swift and sure punishment that you accord anyone else, here’s a reminder of what some of the possible consequences can be to society if you don’t.
More at Out & About – Tennessee News.
The identity theft charge actually makes perfect sense, once you know how the judicial system works. Typically prosecutors go after every single non-mutually-exclusive possible charge that there is some evidence for, as the more that sticks, the harder it is for anyone to . In this case, not only did he murder and steal her car, I vaguely recall that he grabbed her personal documents and credit cards. The only reason to have picked up these would be to obtain money under the pretense that he was her.
I actually suspect that this will help prevent the ‘trans-panic’ defense from sticking, and that is a key part of why they brought forth this charge. If they can prove that he intended to use her identity in this way, it would call into question his own suggested panicing about another’s identity (god damn it, there is no way of talking about that stupid line of defense properly without resorting to their own langauge. Gah.)
Squigglefish
8 Aug 08 at 4:18 am
Bah, I misread Helen, sorry – she was making the same point as I did regarding the trans panic defense. I think hopefully though others will probably be questioning why the identity theft aspect is only now coming to light and why it was taken forth in the first place.
Good move, prosecutors, good move!
Squigglefish
8 Aug 08 at 4:25 am
Yeah, the identity theft charge makes perfect sense – Andrade used Angie’s credit cards, which is one of the core identity theft offenses.
I quoted Helen’s words about that because it highlights yet again the cold, premeditated nature of Andrade’s crime, and contradicts the idea that he committed murder in the heat of the moment. Which is, of course, what Helen G said and what you said, too.
There’s a lot about this crime that was ignored in the media for the sake of making it about how Andrade was yet another victim to a deceiving trans woman.
Lisa Harney
8 Aug 08 at 4:29 am
[...] following the Angie Zapata murder, which I briefly talked about last week, should head over to this post at Questioning Transphobia for updates on what her murderer is up to [...]
I read 1500 feed items a week so you don’t have to. « Uppity Brown Woman
8 Aug 08 at 7:41 pm
[...] This is how many cis people love to paint trans women. This is how Focus On The Family and its affiliated activist groups around the country talk about trans women – they claim we’re pedophiles and rapists just waiting to catch cis women and children alone in a restroom, or that cis men will pose as trans women to do the same. This is how murderers get light sentences after they murder trans women of color – by claiming they found out she was trans and killed her in an uncontrollable rage. Even when she’s been strangled after having slept with him for months, or when she’s been shot in the back. And then they walk free to kill again. [...]
Disclosure, Trans Panic, and Ciscentric Narratives of Honesty at Questioning Transphobia
23 Jul 10 at 5:22 pm