two women tortured Sam Nordquist for a month. on Tuesday both got life without parole.

via News10NBC, OutInPerth, WHEC and 13WHAM.

This one is about torture and it does not get easier further down. If you need to skip it, skip it.

Court in Canandaigua, New York was called for half past nine on Tuesday morning. By late morning Precious Arzuaga, the woman prosecutors have called the ringleader, had been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the first-degree murder of Sam Nordquist. Judge Kristina Karle handed it down. Local reporters in the room say she was in tears by the end of the family's statements.

who sam nordquist was

Start with Sam, because the case file has spent nineteen months burying him under the details of what was done to him.

He was 24, a Black trans man from Minnesota. In September 2024 he traveled to the Finger Lakes to meet a woman he had met online, and he decided to stay. The woman was Arzuaga. He stayed at Patty's Lodge in Hopewell, a motel off a state highway in Ontario County. His family last heard from him at the start of January 2025. He was reported missing on 9 February. His body was found in a field in Yates County, roughly fifty miles southeast of Rochester, on 13 February 2025.

Between those two things he was held and tortured for about a month, physically and psychologically, in a room with other people in it. The assistant district attorney's summary of the acts is on the record and we will give you one line of it rather than all of it: he was denied food, doused with bleach, and sexually assaulted with objects. Prosecutors have described hundreds of separate violent acts.

what the two women pleaded to

Arzuaga pleaded guilty on 26 June to every count in the indictment, with no plea deal and nothing knocked down: first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree aggravated sexual abuse, concealment of a human corpse, conspiracy, coercion, and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Children were in that building. WHEC published the sentence she was facing count by count before she walked in, and it is a long ladder: life without parole on the murder, 25 years to life on the kidnapping, 25 years plus 20 years of post-release supervision on the sexual abuse, and lifetime registration as a sex offender.

She was one of seven people charged. Jennifer "Brooklyn" Quijano, 32, pleaded guilty in July to all counts and walked into the same courtroom on Tuesday afternoon for her own sentencing. Judge Karle gave her life without parole for the first-degree murder as well, plus 25 years to life on the kidnapping and 25 years on the aggravated sexual abuse. Two women went into that courtroom on Tuesday and neither of them is coming back out. Emily Motyka, 19, pleaded guilty in early June to second-degree murder and kidnapping. Kyle Sage, 33, changed his plea to guilty on 14 August. Three are still awaiting trial: Patrick Goodwin, Thomas Eaves and Kimberly Sochia.

Now the part the community has been arguing about since the winter he died, and the part that will not be settled by today.

why no hate crime charge

None of them were ever charged with a hate crime. The Ontario County district attorney's office said early on that there was no indication the killing was one, noting that Sam and the people who killed him knew each other, that they identified as LGBTQ+, and that at least one of them had been living with him. GLAAD publicly asked DA James Ritts to reconsider. He did not.

Assistant district attorney Kelly Wolford put the reasoning like this: "A hate crime would make this charge about Sam's gender or about Sam's race," she said, and, "To limit us to a hate crime would be an injustice to Sam." A Rochester defense attorney, Vincent Merante, gave 13WHAM the unsentimental version of the same maths. "There's no benefit to it. They're already charged with the highest crime possible, murder 1."

Both things are true at once and that is why it still stings. In New York a hate crime designation on top of murder one buys the prosecution nothing at sentencing, because there is nothing above life without parole. And a trans man was tortured to death for a month and the state's official record of it will never say why anyone thought they could.

what his sister said

What his sister Kayla Nordquist read into that room was not about any of this. "My brother is gone. Nothing will ever change that." Then she told the court who to hold on to instead. "That's the person I want you to know today. Sam, my brother. Not Sam, the victim." And the sentence that explains the whole trip to New York: "He wanted to build a life with someone who loved him for exactly who he was."

The weekend before the sentencing, Sam's mother and sister flew in from Minnesota and spent it in Rochester, fifty miles up the road from the field where he was found. They honored him at Rochester's first ever Trans Pride Festival, and at a weekly pizza run put on by a local outfit called Operation Caring Hearts. That is where the family chose to be with the days before court. Put that next to the courtroom and keep them both.

Say his name. Sam Nordquist, 24, of Minnesota, who went east to meet somebody who said they loved him.

Sources: News10NBC, OutInPerth, WHEC, 13WHAM, News 8 WROC, 13WHAM on the hate crime decision.