Gay Panic

Gwen Araujo was a 17-year-old transgender girl from Newark, California. In the fall of 2002 she spent time at a house in Newark where a group of young men often gathered, and she had been intimate with two of them. On the night of October 3, 2002, during a party there, the men learned that Gwen was transgender.

Michael Magidson, José Merél, Jason Cazares, and Jaron Nabors beat and strangled her. They wrapped her body, drove it into the Sierra Nevada, and buried it in a shallow grave in the El Dorado National Forest. Word of the killing spread, and on October 15, Nabors led investigators to the grave.

Nabors pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and testified for the prosecution; he was sentenced to 11 years in 2006. The first trial of the other three ended in a mistrial in 2004. In September 2005 a second jury convicted Magidson and Merél of second-degree murder and deadlocked on Cazares, who then pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and received six years. Magidson and Merél were each sentenced to 15 years to life. Defense arguments that the men acted in a “panic” led California to pass the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act in 2006. Merél was granted parole in 2016, and Magidson was denied parole again in 2024.