Julia Grace Egler transitioning daughter kills her mother, Kelley McCollom and her younger boyfriend Matthew Szejnrok amid gender identity disagreements along with taking exception to her mom’s love interest.
A teenage boy transitioning to a girl fatally shot her mother and wounded her mother’s considerably younger boyfriend before then proceeding to stab the man after running out of bullets.
Julia Grace Egler, 16, was charged with two counts of first-degree premeditated murder after the transgender teen admitted to killing the couple moments after they arrived home, police said.
Identified as the victims were Kelley McCollom, 41, and Matthew Szejnrok, 22, who were slain as they returned to a Palm Bay, Florida, residence on July 6.
‘Welcome home!’
Initially the ‘daughter’ had called 911 and made up a story about hiding in her room while an intruder ransacked the home and killed the couple before relenting during police questioning according to Florida Today.
Julia confessed to detectives murdered them because she didn’t like that her mother was dating a much younger man, and was ‘not vey accepting of her gender transition,’ according to the arrest affidavit.
Authorities said she explained that she stole her mother’s gun and waited in the kitchen with the weapon along with a knife hidden in her pockets and waited for the couple to return home about 10:30 pm.
‘Welcome home,’ she told them, before allegedly opened fire on her mother with the .38 caliber revolver, shooting her several times until she was dead.
Premeditated murder
Police say Julia then turned the gun on Szejnrok as he fled to the bathroom and begged for his life, only to repeatedly shoot him anyway, Space Coast Rocket reported.
When the gun ran out of bullets, she allegedly took out the kitchen knife and began stabbing the boyfriend on the bathroom floor.
Szejnrok, mortally wounded and in agony, ‘essentially asked [Julia] to take him out of his misery’, the affidavit read according to WKMG.
Julia walked back to her mother’s room, loaded another bullet into the revolver, and shot him in the head to finish him off, police said.
She then allegedly staged the crime scene to look like a home invasion, and called 911 at 12:06 am, hysterically crying that her mother had been murdered.
Julia told police when they arrived that the intruder broke in through the back sliding glass door and she hid inside her room with her pet pit bull.
Some time later, she heard McCollom and Szejnrok come home, followed by screaming and gunshots, she claimed.
She claimed to have kept hiding in her room for another hour before venturing out and discovering the bodies.
However, police quickly found that her story didn’t add up.
Ongoing conflicts
Palm Bay Police Lieutenant Virginia Kilmer said mother and daughter had ‘many disagreements in the previous weeks.’
‘Egler cited long-standing conflicts with her mother, including disagreements related to her gender transition, as well as disapproval of her mother’s relationship with Szejnrok, as motives for the crime,’ he said.
Julia transitioned from male to female many years earlier as a young child, appearing as a girl on McCollom’s social media pages from at least 2015.
Her posts appeared to be very supportive of her daughter’s gender identity, always calling her ‘my daughter’ and sharing photos of them together.
Of note, just months earlier, Szejnrok was arrested on April 14 and charged with domestic battery after the younger boyfriend repeatedly grabbed McCollom while arguing in public.
Prosecutors dismissed the charges, and the 22 year old boyfriend was allowed to return home to McCollom and Julia, WFTV reported.
Julia remains held in juvenile detention, with prosecutors determining if she will be charged as an adult. The investigation is ongoing.
