Murder of Jan Pawel and Quiana Jenkins Pietrzak - Motives

Motives

Three days after the murder, the Los Angeles Times ran an October 18, 2008, news brief noting that the bodies were identified on October 17. On Monday, November 3, the Sheriff's Department announced that it had four Marines under arrest for the murders. As part of the November 3 announcement, the Sheriff's Department noted that investigators had found numerous items of evidence since October 15 linking the four to the killings, even though the killers set a fire in the house to destroy evidence. On November 6, CNN television news journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell reported that the four Marines under arrest were African American and raised the possibility of race as a motivation, stating,

The four suspects are African-American. The woman who was murdered is African-American. Her husband is white. Is there a racial motive here that authorities are looking into? Because you can't just say it's about money when there's sexual assault.

In early November, the four Marines were charged with two counts of murder with special circumstances — murder during commission of a felony, murder during commission of a robbery and committing more than one offense. They additionally face one charge each of sexual penetration with a foreign object, and the District Attorney's office will decide if to pursue death sentences. Just after the release of the charges, the New York Post ran a story entitled "A Few 'Bad' Men - Race Eyed in Marine Dual Slay" which noted that the four accused Marines "could face the death penalty amid speculation the mixed-race couple was targeted in a bias attack." At about the same time, District Attorney Rod Pacheco emphasized the robbery motive, commenting, "To burglarize their home and then to treat them in the way they did before they died and to murder them — it's hard for our minds to comprehend this kind of savagery."

By mid-November, the Riverside County Sheriff's Central Homicide unit responded to the race motivation issue, stating "There's nothing to suggest what happened was a racial crime." Detectives said jewelry, a camera, and wedding gifts had been stolen, and that some of the items were found in the suspects' barracks.

Despite the conclusion proposed by the investigators, the couple's parents and many in the general populace, as shown by blogs and posts over the Internet, continue to believe that there was a possible racial motive, particularly since Jenkins-Pietrzak was sexually assaulted, and there was evidence of premeditation in the murders (as 'Chillin waitin 4 da killin' was posted on a perpetrator's MySpace page before the murders) Anti-miscegenation racial epithets in the form of "Nigger Lover" were found on the wall near the master bedroom and on a bathroom mirror. The Defendents have all indicated that spray-painting the racial epithets was a calculated attempt to misdirect investigators.

On November 20, all four pleaded not guilty to murdering the Pietrzaks. District Attorney Rod Pacheco on February 2, 2009, decided to pursue the death penalty against the suspects.