On April 22, Allen Andrade, an unemployed 32-year-old who had
spent time in prison for a string of non-violent crimes, was convicted
of first-degree murder for beating to death eighteen-year-old Angie
Zapata of Greeley. A striking beauty, Angie was born a boy named Justin
David Zapata but had been living as a woman for several years. She and
Andrade had met sometime before the murder on the social networking
website MocoSpace and spent three days together before he killed
her.
Colorado is one of eleven states with hate-crime laws that
protect transgender people, and gay-rights advocates believe that
Andrade is the first person in the country to be convicted of a hate
crime for murdering a transgender person.
By deciding that hatred had motivated Andrade to kill, the jury
rejected his lawyers' argument that he had "snapped" after figuring out
that Angie was biologically male — a violent response to a
shocking lie, not murder.
While the most important questions were answered in the
courtroom, many smaller ones — little mysteries that may never be
solved — were left open. Some are broader in scope, while others
focus on unexplained details. Here, we look at seven of them.
Q: Was Angie working as a prostitute?
A: Defense attorneys say she was. Her friends and family say no
way.
Before trial, defense attorneys asked if they could question
Angie's former roommate, J.J. Alejandro, about whether she "performed
sexual favors for money with Hispanic males from 'Spanish' bars." They
said Alejandro — a platonic friend who lived with Angie for three
months last year — knew about specific instances of sex for pay
and knew that the Hispanic males "believed the alleged victim was a
biological female."
In a March ruling, Judge Marcelo Kopcow said the question of
whether Angie was a prostitute was irrelevant to the case.
Alejandro didn't respond to a request to be interviewed for this
story, but Angie's friends say there's no way she was working as a
prostitute. As proof, they point to her swagger and say she respected
herself too much.
She also didn't need the money, some say. "She worked at Good
Times as a manager, and then her sister was paying her rent and giving
her money. And then she had a roommate. So why would she need to make
more money?" asks Kitty DeLeon, a transgender woman who acted as
Angie's male-to-female mentor. "I told her that there's trannies that
do that, and I don't want you to do that. You go live a regular
life."
But friends and family admit that in the months before she died,
they didn't know much about Angie's life. She'd moved to Greeley and
was living in her own apartment, away from most of her family for the
first time. She had new friends and new hangouts.
"When she went to Greeley, I cried," says childhood friend
Rochelle Camacho. "I called her and I cried and said, 'We don't even
talk anymore'.... We became a little distant, and that's what hurts me
the most. I wish we weren't distant when she passed."
Friends and family say Angie wanted to save for school —
and eventually maybe a sex change — but had a hard time hanging
on to cash. "She tried saving money, but somehow she couldn't save it,"
says another childhood friend, Felecia Luna. She'd see a cute outfit or
purse, and the money was as good as gone.
Mercedes Ponderelli, a friend of Angie's from Greeley, says money
is why Angie took on a roommate. There may have been a joke going
around that Angie was going to prostitute for money, but that's all it
was — a joke. To her knowledge, Angie never did that. "Angie
wanted to find someone to love her," Ponderelli says.
Is Allen Andrade in a gang?
Prosecutors and police say he is. He hasn't admitted it.
According to a police report, Andrade has been a known member of
the Hispanic Sureño 13 gang since 2000. And he was charged twice
with rioting in a detention facility for his involvement in two
gang-related fights at the Weld County Jail in Greeley, where he was
locked up while awaiting trial. (Those charges have since been dropped,
as Andrade has already been sentenced to life without parole plus sixty
years in prison, says Weld County Chief Deputy District Attorney Robb
Miller, who prosecuted the murder case against Andrade.)
The first fight happened in September, two months after Andrade
was arrested for Angie's murder. According to a police report, a fight
broke out between two inmates, both of whom are Sureño gang
members. Corrections officers responded by deploying "chemical agents."
They also ordered all of the nearby inmates to return to their
cells.
But Andrade and several others didn't obey. The report says
Andrade "joined in the fight," assisting gang member Johnny "Whisper"
Hernandez, who was in jail on charges that he murdered his infant
daughter.
In January, Andrade disobeyed again. When another gang-related
fight broke out, he refused to return to his cell and continued to
stand nearby. "Although his involvement in the second riot appears
nominal," wrote Officer Michael Prill of the Greeley Police
Department's gang unit, "his tacit involvement was supportive of the
Sureños" and was an "additional diversion to jail staff dealing
with a dangerous situation."
