Michael Magidson told a parole board on Wednesday that he wasn’t ready for release. Jose Merel, 36, was granted parole on Friday with the support of Guerrero, pending a review from the Board of Parole Hearings and Gov. Gwen Amber Rose Araujo, 17, was murdered in Newark in 2002 after men who had hooked up with her found out she was biologically male.įourteen years later, the two men convicted of second-degree murder faced a parole board for the first time this week in a world more aware of what it means to be a transgender person and the dangers the trans community faces. 4, 2002, after they confirmed she was biologically male.
They viciously beat and strangled Gwen to death at a Newark house party on Oct. Gwen, often called a woman, was really just a 90-pound girl with no chance against the four drunken young men, including two who had been sexually intimate with her, Guerrero said. Today she’s an admired activist for transgender causes, even though the horror of Gwen’s fate has upended her life.
Sylvia Guerrero had never even heard the word “transgender” until her 17-year-old daughter Gwen Araujo, born a son named Eddie, was brutally murdered.
