Brandon Teena: the murder that put a county on trial
Two men raped and killed Brandon Teena in 1993; years later, Nebraska's highest court held the sheriff who failed him liable.
Brandon Teena was 21 when he was shot and killed in a farmhouse near Humboldt, Nebraska, on December 31, 1993. He was a transgender man. He died alongside Lisa Lambert and Phillip DeVine. John Lotter and Marvin Thomas Nissen killed all three.
A rape came first. On December 25, 1993, Lotter and Nissen drove Brandon to a remote spot and sexually assaulted him after learning he was transgender. Brandon reported it to the Richardson County Sheriff's Office. Days later, the same two men went looking for him and killed him.
What happened in the gap between that report and the murders became the spine of a landmark lawsuit. Brandon told Sheriff Charles B. Laux he had been raped. Laux questioned him in a confrontational, graphic way about his anatomy and his identity. No arrest followed, even though Laux knew Lotter and Nissen had criminal histories. Then Brandon was dead.
Both killers were convicted. Nissen testified that Lotter fired the fatal shots and got life in prison. Lotter was convicted and sentenced to death, and he has stayed on Nebraska's death row through years of appeals that the state's courts have rejected. Nissen later recanted and claimed he was the shooter. That account has not undone Lotter's conviction.
The criminal cases punished the men who pulled the trigger. The civil case put the system that failed Brandon on trial. His mother, JoAnn Brandon, sued Richardson County and Sheriff Laux for negligence and wrongful death.
The Nebraska Supreme Court decided Brandon v. County of Richardson in 2001. It held that the sheriff and county bore legal responsibility. Laux, the court found, owed Brandon a duty of care once he reported the rape, and he breached it. The court called his conduct during the December 25 interview extreme and outrageous.
Then it corrected the math. The trial court had cut the award by 85 percent, blaming that share on the intentional acts of Lotter and Nissen, and shaved off another 1 percent for supposed negligence by Brandon himself. The Supreme Court threw out both reductions. Brandon bore no fault for being murdered, it ruled, and reversed.
Read it plainly. A 21-year-old reported a rape, named the men who threatened him, and was killed by those same men days later. A court later found that the official he turned to had failed him, and that the county had to answer for it. Brandon's death also reached a far wider audience through the 1999 film "Boys Don't Cry."