A desperate 911 call from a teenager alerted officers to a home invasion that ended in tragedy. However, the scene would reveal a very different story.
After midnight on July 7, 2024, officers responded to a house in Palm Bay, Florida, after a call from 16-year-old Julia Grace Egler. Apparently, a man entered the house through the back sliding window and took the life of her mother, 38-year-old Kelley McCollom, and her mother’s boyfriend, 22-year-old Matthew Szejnrok.
The teenager could barely contain her anguish as she recounted the events; she blamed herself for what happened. According to what she said, she was unable to warn them about the stranger in the house, and both victims lost their lives from multiple shotgun blasts and stab wounds with a butcher knife.
The teenager revealed that they had had an argument that same night and that she regretted not having been able to tell her that she loved her. After some time in the officers’ care, they would discover that the teenager identified as male, under the name Jasper. In addition, while they were investigating the events, one of the officers would realize that it was not the first time they had responded to that house.
Three months before the tragedy, on April 8, 2024, officers responded to a domestic dispute between Julia/Jasper and her mother, revealing their complex relationship and, in particular, the teenager’s identity.
According to her mother’s account, the teenager had locked herself in the bathroom while drinking alcohol mixed with pills prescribed after a psychiatric evaluation.
Back at the crime scene, the officers were confused by the facts. Jasper gave them a confusing and contradictory timeline of events, while shell casings could be seen at the scene but there was no sign of the murder weapon. According to Jasper, there was a possibility that the intruder had stolen and used the gun that the youth’s mother kept at home. Suddenly, one of the detectives asked them to be careful with the questions:
“I’m sure she killed them”
Officers discovered bloody sneaker prints around the bodies and the house; they were Julia/Jasper’s Converse. Once at the station, officers took the teenager’s shoes and kept her there overnight, without revealing their suspicions.
After a couple of hours, Julia/Jasper would be interrogated. The teenager would confess that she and her mother had an argument the previous day about a party the teenager wanted to go to, ending with the mother confiscating her phone and moving into a topic of habitual disagreement between them, Julia’s trans identity.
According to Julia/Jasper, her mother held transphobic attitudes, claiming that the identity of Jasper that the teenager had assumed was only part of an adolescent phase, denying any possibility for Julia/Jasper to undergo hormone treatment and eventual gender reassignment surgery.
During the incident that occurred 3 months earlier, her mother would express her opinion to the police:
Basically this garbage that kids are getting into now… All this trans stuff… is so bad and I’m totally against it. I was like: “If you want to think you’re a boy, you can think it” “But you’re my daughter, you’re Julia, so let’s just not talk about that then”
Finally, Julia/Jasper would be confronted with the evidence and the contradictions in her account, with the teenager ultimately confessing to having taken the life of her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.
The rest of the confession would be kept confidential, given the coldness of the account; in it, Julia/Jasper revealed that the motive was her mother’s lack of support for her gender transition.