Texas Man Sentenced to 48 Years for Murdering Muhlaysia Booker

metroweekly.com:

found on a Dallas street on the morning of May 18, 2019. She had recently spoken out about being attacked by an angry mob following a minor car accident in front of a local apartment complex.Police said they identified Lyles as the suspect in Booker’s murder while investigating the deaths of a man and a woman killed in two separate shootings in the days around Booker’s death.Lyles has also been charged in those deaths.

Neither of the other two victims identified as transgender, according to The Associated Press.According to police, Booker got into a vehicle matching the description of a car driven by Lyles about three hours before the discovery of her body.

A witness who saw her told investigators that Lyles would frequently visit the area to meet with transgender sex workers.Police were also able to discover that Lyles’s and Booker’s phones had been traveling together around the time she was killed.

Lyles had her phone in his possession after the body was found. Richard Franklin, an attorney for Lyles, said that his client’s guilty plea in the death of Booker “was the right result,” although he was unable to offer a motive for the shooting.In response to Lyles’s guilty plea, Stephanie Houston, Booker’s mother, expressed relief at finally having a resolution.“No amount of time can bring Muhlaysia back, and although we wish the sentence was capital punishment, our family can finally have some sense of closure knowing that justice was served and he can’t cause any more families hurt and pain,” Houston said in a statement.Ahmad Goree, the board president for the Muhlaysia Booker Foundation, which Houston started to help transgender people following her daughter’s death, thanked police and the district attorney’s office for.