Manhattan man gets 29 years to life in prison for strangling a transgender woman to death in Glendale nearly 15 years ago: DA

A long and arduous journey through the Queens criminal justice system has come to an end for a Manhattan man nearly 15 years after he murdered a 29-year-old transgender woman inside her Glendale apartment.

Rasheen Everett was sentenced to up to 29 years to life in prison by Queens Supreme Court Justice Michael Yavinsky on Monday for strangling Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar at her home on 62nd Street and pouring bleach over her body in an attempt to hide evidence before stealing her personal belongings.

Everett was re-tried after his 2013 conviction was overturned due to a judge's error during a trial that opened on Sept. 18, with closings on Oct. 2. The jury deliberated for approximately one hour before reaching the guilty verdict.

Everett, 43, of Jefferson Street in Lower Manhattan, was found guilty after a jury trial in October of murder in the second degree, burglary, and tampering with physical evidence.

“This defendant callously took the life of a young woman and then tried to hide his crime,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said.

According to trial records, on the morning of March 27, 2010, Everett entered the apartment of the victim, Gonzalez-Andujar, at 8:50 a.m. Several minutes after he entered, the victim’s upstairs neighbors heard screams and loud banging, consistent with a struggle. Police from the 104th Precinct in Ridgewood were called to the location, but no one answered the door when the officers tried to gain entry. Approximately eighteen hours later, just after 3 a.m., Everett was seen on video surveillance exiting the apartment by himself while carrying two bags. The bags were later discovered to contain the victim’s camera, keys, laptop, suitcase, coat, and cell phone.

Three days later, at around 4 p.m. on March 30, 2010, concerned family members entered the apartment and found the body of Gonzalez-Andujar lying on a bed with chemical burns across her body and a bottle of empty bleach nearby. The city’s Chief Medical Examiner later determined that the chemical burns occurred post-mortem and that the cause of death was manual compression of the neck, more commonly known as strangulation.

After the murder, Everett fled the state, but he was arrested in Las Vegas on April 9, 2010, and extradited back to Queens. His DNA was found under the victim's fingernails. Everett was found guilty following his initial four-week-long trial in 2013. He served several years of his prison sentence before his conviction was overturned on appeal in 2021 due to a judicial error of the trial judge who retired from the bench in 2020.

“After a prior reversal of his conviction due to judicial error, we retried the defendant, and the jury returned a guilty verdict,” Katz said.

Justice Yavinsky sentenced Everett to 25 years to life in prison on the murder charge, 15 years on the burglary charge to run concurrently, and two to four years on the tampering with physical evidence charge to run consecutively.

“I hope today’s sentence brings a long-awaited measure of solace to the victim’s family,” Katz said.