A murder over a girl : justice, gender, junior high /

THE MURDER TRIAL of Brandon McInerney took two months and tore through 98 witnesses, all over an incident in which the salient facts were never in dispute. On a February morning in 2008 in Oxnard, Calif., 14-year-old Brandon shot and killed his 15-year-old classmate, Larry King, in the school computer lab, then confessed when the police arrested him almost right away. What drew the psychologist Ken Corbett to the case was the question of Brandon's motive, and whether his actions that day were a direct reaction to the victim's experiments with his gender identity. Larry, Corbett writes, had recently asked a few students to call him Leticia and had, on a few occasions, worn makeup and women's accessories to school. (Corbett usually calls the victim Larry but refers to him as Leticia when he begins presenting as a girl, acknowledging that King's gender identity, as well as his sexuality, were still unsettled at the time of his tragic death.) Brandon, meanwhile, was a more conventional specimen - "handsome, strong, blond and athletic," Corbett writes, "he could have been cast in an advertisement for 'Boy'" - but as it happened, he was anything but normal. In the days before the killing, Brandon told a few people he was going to do it. Afterward, the police uncovered a trove of guns and white-power and neo-Nazi paraphernalia in Brandon's house. The district attorney wasted no time layering on an anti-gay hate crime charge to the charge of first-degree murder. And yet by the time of the trial in 2011, Brandon's defense team had cast him as a normal kid who had snapped after being sexually harassed by Larry. Word even got around that before the murder, Leticia had supposedly asked Brandon to be his valentine. It was a classic "gay panic" defense, and as all too often happens, it worked. The trial resulted in a hung jury. While Brandon later accepted a manslaughter and second-degree murder plea deal that would send him to jail for 21 years, six of the jurors still went on the television program "20/20" and called Larry the "bully" and Brandon the boy with "no way out." Most appallingly, the one administrator who defended Larry's gender experimentation was accused of having a "gay agenda" and widely condemned. Not even Brandon's white-power fascination and the fact that Larry was part African-American persuaded these jurors that Brandon wasn't the trial's real victim. The Larry King case became one of many that demonstrate how so many people still perceive homophobia and transphobia as understandable, even rational. A lot has happened since this trial: Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox and "Transparent" have helped challenge this position, even as violence against the vulnerable continues. What Corbett's introspective, even brooding account of this trial has to add, in our age of ever-escalating racial and gender and ethnic bias attacks, are some powerful insights into how hatred takes hold in the mind of a young person, and how we as a culture might reckon with its consequence. A murder trial is a busy place for a psychologist: The victim exists solely as a projection of others, and what people say about the victim says as much or more about them. A practicing therapist who often helps transgendered youth, Corbett is also an academic whose first book, "Boyhoods," worked to deconstruct young male stereotypes. He attended the trial to see how social norms and gender identity would play out. And while there may be a few too many first-person interludes and diffuse musings for my taste ("Testimony is an urgent story that continues to escape witnesses"; "Horror had fractured surrounding time, space, even personhood"), Corbett's relentlessly open mind is rewarding for the reader. His compassion, in the end, leads him to places he did not expect to go. Corbett analyzes everyone he meets. A hug from the victim's mother, Dawn King (she and her husband had adopted Larry as a toddler; his birth mother was a drug addict who brutally abused and neglected her children and died shortly before Larry's murder), represents, at least to Corbett, her desire to fleetingly recreate her child in him. Corbett, too, works hard to bring Larry/Leticia to life. He reads a lot into his early interest in caterpillars and their transformations, and identifies the risks inherent to who Leticia was: "Every move teetered on abandonment, shame, public scorn, refusal and outright cruelty." And he drives home some salient truths, chiefly that while Larry acted out as a defense, he never bullied anyone. While he teased Brandon and others, no one actually witnessed the valentine incident. It was just a robust rumor, the kind that can take over an unprepared, unenlightened junior high school. Too many grown-ups, his parents included, saw Larry's gender play as a symptom of how disturbed he was rather than as a sign that he was coming into his own. As a friend of Larry's puts it, "He started dressing up more because he felt better about himself." CORBETT UNFORTUNATELY RESORTS to some schematic devices to put people he doesn't like in boxes. Larry's parents are like a greedy Dickensian couple; the defense lawyer is a swaggering character out of a western. His trickiest subject is Brandon himself, who refused all Corbett's requests for an interview and to date has said nothing to explain his actions except to tell the defense side's therapist he did it "to get rid of him and solve my problems and everyone else's." Here, Corbett surprises. He finds that Brandon and Larry led weirdly parallel lives of abuse and neglect; Brandon's childhood was arguably far more physically brutal. He sensitively analyzes Brandon's startling pastime of making Nazi-themed doodles and drawings, wondering if they represent "Brandon's effort to turn away from ordinary life and to powerfully seek another life." He notes how Brandon fell in thrall to a local leader of the white-power movement just as Larry was first telling people to call him Leticia Adolescence is "practice," Corbett writes. They both were experimenting - one hopefully, the other tragically. While Corbett maintains that being only 14 did not shield Brandon from culpability, he comes to understand that youth was an undeniable part of the mix. As an abused child, Brandon "was left to live in bits," he writes, borrowing an idea from the influential psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, "scrambling to defend against the possibility of attack." At school, "Leticia had the upper hand; proper dominance was turned around." And while race barely entered into any discussion of motive during the trial itself, Corbett suggests that Larry's being mixed-race only amplified the problem, in Brandon's mind: Racism, homophobia and transphobia all appeal to people who crave purpose, who can't handle being threatened. "Murder," Corbett writes, "is the ultimate paranoid solution." To regain the moral high ground, Brandon synthesized his rage into duty. The tragedy, Corbett observes, is that before the shots rang out that morning, practically everyone around them interpreted Larry's issues as a problem and Brandon's as just a boy thing. That pathology - our own pathology - continued through the trial. It continues now. Brandon's defense cast him as a normal kid who had snapped after being sexually harassed. ROBERT KOLKER is the author of "Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery."

*Starred Review* The story made national news. In February 2008, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his 15-year-old classmate, Larry King, during first period English class in Oxnard, California. It was a shocking crime. King had recently begun referring to himself as Leticia and wearing high heels, jewelry, and makeup to class. Psychologist Corbett read about it in New York City, where he maintains a private practice, and wanted to learn more. So he traveled to California to attend the trial and conduct interviews, determined to discover the reasons behind this provocative slaying of a boy who had begun to identify as a girl. Why did Brandon, who was white, kill mixed-race Larry in his homeroom class and in front of his teacher and his peers? That is the question that Corbett attempts to answer in this searing and complicated inquiry into gender identity, class, and race in America, as played out in a small city on the edge of Los Angeles. An especially relevant and timely topic, given the ongoing discussion of gender and sexuality in the media.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2016 Booklist

Psychologist Corbett (Boyhoods) recounts, with riveting clarity and deep humanity, the 2011 trial of Brandon McInerney for fatally shooting his 15-year-old classmate Larry King during their middle-school English class in Oxnard, Calif., in 2008. But as he brings careful precision and a trained clinical eye to the desperate, painful facts of the shooter and victim-Brandon, white, from a broken and violent home, was 14 at the time of the shooting and beginning to exhibit white supremacist loyalties; Larry, mixed-race, removed from his adoptive home on charges of abuse, had just begun to identify as transgender-Corbett also excavates the chilling and dangerous beliefs that led the defense to construct a persuasive story of a "normal" boy pushed over the edge of self-control by a flamboyant "queer." He draws out the suspense of the courtroom drama by intertwining his professional knowledge of adolescents, gender, and trauma with empathetic portraits of the people involved, and he recounts his personal struggle to understand the case as it unfolds. Corbett depicts these events as a story in which emotion outweighs logic and ethics, in which exhibiting gender variance is a worse crime than hatred, and in which the human mind makes sense of something confounding through denial and erasure. Profound and disturbing, this heartbreaking testimony of our culture's worst fissures suggests that understanding is the only way to heal. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Corbett (psychology, New York Univ. Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Boyhoods) bears witness to the trial of Brandon McInerney for the 2008 murder of classmate Larry/Leticia King. Exploring the psychological and social fault-lines of racism and fear of nonnormative gender and sexual expression, Corbett seeks to understand why -McInerney shot King and how the case unfolded in the community, national media, and at trial. Corbett pieces his narrative together through news coverage, observation during trial, and interviews he conducted with family members, witnesses, school staff, law enforcement, and community members. He describes how McInerney's violent actions were normalized, even justified, while King's explorations of a nascent transgender and/or queer self were repeatedly framed as socially disruptive and sexually aggressive. At times, the close reading of the case feels undercontextualized; more could have been done to place King's murder within the ongoing pattern of violence against queer and trans youth of color. VERDICT Corbett powerfully documents the life-threatening consequences of America's persistent fear of gender difference. This will be read by those with academic, political, and personal interest in making the world safer for LGBT youth.-Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. Lib., Boston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A teenager's murder raises issues of bullying and homophobia.In 2008, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his classmate Larry King in their junior high school English class. Psychologist Corbett (Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy/New York Univ.; Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities, 2009), unsettled by the crime, decided to mount his own investigation into its causes and consequences. "What was on Brandon's mind?" he asked. "What were the feelings that compelled him, or the fantasies that drove him, to shoot Larry? What had been the state of his life? How had it come to this?" (The author refers to the victim as Larry while covering the trial and as Leticia when "writing from her perspective.") Corbett recounts the trial so exhaustively that the narrative often reads like a court transcript. He reports interviews with McInerney's and King's parents, friends, and some of the 98 witnesses for the defense and prosecution. He also effectively reveals how deeply the trial affected him. The story of a murder, he reflects, "is not simply a recitation of facts or a pragmatic account of the living and the dead." This murder was tangled in accusations of bullying, white supremacy, and hate. Brandon's lawyers portrayed their client as an abused child (both parents were drug addicts) who had been taunted by Larry, an effeminate boy who was undergoing a gender transition. The prosecution argued that Brandon was a gang member "enflamed by white supremacist ideology" and "a self-declared vigilante homophobe" who "hunted and executed a gender-variant kid." After a 36-day trial, the jury considered three possible verdicts: first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or voluntary manslaughter. But they could not agree, ending in a hung jury, with several jurors protesting vigorously because Brandon had been tried as an adult. Corbett deems the crime murder, and he was troubled when a juror who concurred told him that the hate crime charge of homophobia had been barely discussed. In the end, Brandon pled guilty to second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter, sentenced to 21 years in prison.An emotionally resonant account of a real-life tragedy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.