A Murder Over a Girl

Book excerpt: In February 2008, during first period English class at a junior high school in Oxnard, California, blue-eyed and blond fourteen-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed fifteen-year-old Larry King, a brown boy, who had recently begun to identify as "Leticia." Shaken by a newspaper item about this murder and further unsettled by ongoing media that sidestepped gender identity and race in the coverage of the crime, psychologist Ken Corbett traveled to LA to attend the trial. Drawing on firsthand observations, interviews, and decades of academic work on gender and sexuality, Corbett holds the point of view of every witness up to the light. As visions of victim and perpetrator were woven and unwoven in the theater of the courtroom, a haunting story unfolds about the two young lives at the center of this tragedy, along with, but the story of their community, their families, friends, schoolmates, and teachers. Deeply compassionate, and brimming with startling insights, A Murder Over a Girl is a wrenching and unforgettable drama of the human psyche that will leave readers shaken yet newly fortified by the hope that comes from knowledge.