Ally Steinfeld case: Prosecutor to seek death penalty for Vrba over trans teen slaying

The man accused of killing a transgender teen in Texas County in 2017 will be tried in Greene County.

Andrew Vrba, 19, is charged with first-degree murder, armed criminal action and abandonment of a corpse, that of 17-year-old Ally Steinfeld, who identified as a male-to-female transgender person.

According to online court documents, Texas County Prosecutor Parke J. Stevens Jr. intends to seek the death penalty for Vrba.

Vrba's case was originally assigned to a Crawford County Judge, but that judge was defeated in his reelection bid, Stevens explained.

The case was moved to Greene County earlier this week. According to one of his defense attorneys, Patrick Berrigan, a judge has not yet been assigned.

Berrigan said Vrba will be moved to the Greene County Justice Center. Vrba is currently in the Texas County jail.

Steinfeld's remains were found in September 2017 near a mobile home just north of Cabool.

According to online court documents, Stevens intends to prove the following statutory aggravating circumstances: that the alleged murder in the first degree was "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman in that it involved torture, or depravity of mind."

Two young women, Briana Calderas, 24, and Isis Schauer, 18, told authorities they helped burn Steinfeld's body after Vrba gouged out Steinfeld's eyes, repeatedly stabbed the teen — including multiple times in the genitals — and bragged about the killing, according to court records.

Vrba told investigators he initially tried to poison Steinfield, then described how he stabbed Steinfeld in the living room of Calderas' mobile home, according to the probable cause statement.

No motive was given in the probable cause statement. All three were charged with first-degree murder, armed criminal action and abandonment of a corpse.

Schauer, 18, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in December 2017.

Schauer was sentenced to 20 years in prison. As part of the plea agreement, the charge against Schauer was lowered from first-degree murder to second-degree murder.

Calderas is also waiting for trial charged with first-degree murder in connection with the killing. She is in the Texas County jail.

A fourth person, James T. Grigsby, 25, of Thayer, pleaded guilty to abandonment of a corpse and was sentenced to four years in prison

Steinfeld identified as a male-to-female, transgender lesbian on social media and spoke with her sister, Ashleigh Boswell, about being transgender.

Boswell told the News-Leader in an earlier interview that Steinfield had been dating Calderas for about three weeks and seemed happy. The last time Boswell spoke with Steinfield was on Sept. 1, 2017. Boswell said Steinfield said she was in trouble but didn't go into details.

Steinfeld's father, Joseph Steinfeld Sr., had said the family got worried when no one heard from the teen on Sept. 9, what would have been the younger Steinfeld's 18th birthday. The family traveled from their home near St. Louis to Texas County to hand out missing person fliers and talk to the teen's new group of friends — the same people who are now charged in the murder.

"I personally talked to AJ (Andrew Vrba). The hand that killed my son, he shook my hand," Joseph Steinfeld Sr. said last year. "I want them to fry in the chair. I want them to get the needle. I don't know how somebody can do what they did to my child."

Despite the horrific details of Steinfeld's death, Texas County authorities have said they don't believe the killing was a hate crime.

"I would say murder in the first-degree is all that matters," Stevens told the Associated Press. "That is a hate crime in itself."

Andrew Vrba is charged with first degree murder, armed criminal action and abandonment of a corpse. Houston Herald

Missouri law allows certain low-level felonies and serious misdemeanors to be charged as hate offenses, if prosecutors believe an offender was motivated because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or disability of the victim or victims. In that case, there can be "enhanced penalties for certain offenses."

The charges filed against those accused in Steinfeld's killing are not covered by the hate offense statute — first-degree murder already carries more significant penalties than a hate offense, which tops out as a class D felony.

Amber Steinfeld said the family was beginning to accept Steinfeld’s gender identity, although in remembrances posted online, some relatives still referred to Steinfeld as male.

Her mother alternatively referred to Steinfeld as male and female to The Star.

“We were starting to (refer to her as female),” Amber Steinfeld said. “We’d known him as Joey for so long, but we accepted him for who he was.”

She called the alleged crimes “pure hatred and pure evil.”

Some have speculated whether the killing was a hate crime — whether Steinfeld’s gender identity was motivation in her killing.

For the past three years, LGBT advocacy groups have tallied the killings of more than 20 transgender people in the U.S. Yet state or federal hate crime laws are rarely used to prosecute the slayings.

Now many LGBT-rights groups are questioning the effectiveness of the laws, saying they sometimes focus too tightly on individual acts without addressing underlying bias or wider violence. Steinfeld’s death thrust the volatile issue back into the spotlight.

Texas County investigators insist — without specifying a motive — that Ally Lee Steinfeld’s death was not the result of anti-transgender hate.

Sources: news-leader.com, Jackie Rehwald, December 6, 2018. Kansascity.com, Max Londeberg, Sept. 29, 2018

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