BURLINGTON, Ia. — On an unseasonably cold Wednesday evening last year, 16-year-old Kedarie Johnson stopped by a close friend’s house to try on bras.

As the two talked, the normally jovial Burlington High School student shared that he was scared of a man named “Lumni.” He said he’d noticed a mysterious red car following him that day. He wasn’t sure who was behind the wheel or where the vehicle was as they spoke.

Kedarie didn’t stay long at his friend’s house. He asked to borrow a few of the bras he’d modeled, and the friend, 15 at the time, obliged. Kedarie tucked the undergarments into his black and blue school backpack and braced against the biting wind as he walked into the night alone.

Their quick exchange was one of the last times Kedarie Johnson was seen alive.

At about 11:36 p.m. March 2, 2016, Burlington police found Kedarie's body, his chest riddled with bullets, discarded in the wild prairie overgrowth of a quiet alley.

He was wearing women’s clothes, and strands of his hair weave had been pulled from his scalp by a garbage bag cinched around his head. A harsh chlorine-like smell hung in the air, and an empty bottle of Dollar General-brand bleach lay edgewise.

The last hours of Kedarie's life and the brutal details of his death are spelled out in more than 300 pages of court documents that provide new information about the slaying, including evidence that he may have been sexually assaulted.

The documents display efforts by local police and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigations to solve a homicide they decided early on “indicates planning and preparation to cause the death of Johnson, as well as efforts to conceal and destroy items of evidentiary value connected to the homicide.”

In January, two men were charged with first-degree murder in the case: Jorge “Lumni” Sanders-Galvez, 23, and Jaron “Wikked West” Purham, 26. Sanders-Galvez's trial is scheduled to start Tuesday.

But even as facts surrounding what happened on the night of March 2 are revealed, the 16-year-old's family and friends still have one gnawing question: "Why Kedarie?"

Those involved in the investigation won't discuss a motive. Kedarie's mom, Katrina Johnson, isn't sure she'll ever know why someone chose to snuff out her son's life before he ever really got to live it. But she does believe that whoever killed him was motivated by a deep hatred of his LGBTQ identity.

"I have always said it was a hate crime. I had to view his crime scene photos, and the photos in itself, it screams hate crime all over it," Katrina Johnson said, declining to discuss specifics.

Kedarie’s case has drawn national headlines and, in recent months, the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division. Both the FBI and the Department of Justice have assisted in the case, and a grand jury was convened to explore a federal indictment on a hate crime charge, which could carry a death penalty.

Earlier this month, Christopher J. Perras, a prominent hate crime lawyer with the Justice Department, was added to the prosecution's team.

Since Sanders-Galvez and Purham were charged in January, the road to court has been long and winding. At least three lawyers have been connected to Sanders-Galvez, and dozens of motions have been submitted to the court. The most recent, a motion for a second change of venue, was granted Thursday.

Johnson said she's been engulfed by a “dark bubble” since a police officer knocked on her door to tell her that her son had been slain. It colors her days, she said, and she's keenly aware its presence might be part of her new normal.

She's already nervous to go to trial, and the idea of any sort of postponement is panic-inducing. She hopes getting through the trial might give her a “little peace of mind.”

“Dealing with a mother’s pain like this, that is something you can never be ready for,” she said. “I don’t care how strong she is, you can never be prepared to actually come face to face with the person that has participated in taking your son’s life.”

A difficult childhood

Kedarie was born smiling, Johnson said. He loved to take selfies and do his hair and makeup. He had the sort of electric personality that dominated a room, and he planned to be famous one day.

His childhood was marked by hardship. Johnson was a single mother to two boys, Kedarie and Cedric, and a girl, Nijah, and the family struggled financially.

For a while, they traveled between homeless shelters in Chicago.

In 2001, Johnson moved her children to Burlington, a Mississippi River town of 25,000 people, “to give them a new life,” she said.

But some of their troubles followed them across the river. Johnson lost her job, so she and Kedarie took up residence in a local motel. At the time, Cedric lived with a local pastor and Nijah was with relatives in Chicago.

Kedarie's family members were the most important people in his world, and Johnson was more like his best friend than his mother, said Shaunda Campbell, a former Burlington High counselor and close family friend. He was determined to help his mom find an apartment and get them back on their feet, she said.

"Here’s a 16-year-old kid going to work at Taco Bell every night, getting off of work late at night, knowing he has to go to school in the morning, and he’s taking his paycheck and putting it with mom’s money so they could rent this motel by the week,” Campbell said.

"To me, for as young as he was, he had adult problems that I felt like he should not have had to deal with."

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As a child, Kedarie gravitated toward feminine toys, Johnson said. He’d play with dolls and purses and comb girls’ hair instead of "throwing rocks and playing ball" with his younger brother and cousins.

While sometimes reported to be a transgender teen, Kedarie’s status isn’t that simple, those who knew him said. Most of the time he presented as male, but he loved to wear hair extensions and leggings.

He sometimes went by Kandicee and kept a Facebook page under that name, but his friends and family say Kedarie exclusively responded to the pronoun "he" offline.

He had girlfriends, his mother said, but preferred men. She described him as a "young teenage boy who liked to cross-dress."

At 16, he was on the cusp of “figuring himself out,” his pastor, Nathan Williams, said at the time of Kedarie's death.

On the day he was slain, a Wednesday, Kedarie was serving the second day of a two-day suspension.

He had talked back to a teacher Monday, Campbell remembered, and he’d been dancing in the hallways — again. He was known to take his shoes off and bust a few moves up and down the school’s corridors in between classes.

Kedarie never did “really bad things,” Campbell said, but he would mouth off or skip class or be in the bathroom doing his makeup when he wasn’t supposed to be. These little things would pile up until administrators felt like they needed to take action, Campbell said.

Campbell knew the suspension would mean a chunk of idle time for Kedarie, who thrived around people, so she suggested he try to find work at the clothing expo, in the local auditorium, to see if they needed help for a few days.

The pair planned to go to that same clothing expo Thursday to buy clothes for the winter. She told him Monday that it only made sense that he have some money in his pocket.

Kedarie wouldn't make it Thursday's scheduled outing.

'See you later, Ma'

Less than an hour before he got to his friend’s house on March 2, 2016, Johnson was having an argument over Facebook with a person using the profile “Nathaniel Jones."

Kedarie had Facebook accounts for both Kedarie Pierre Johnson, his given name, and Kandicee, his female persona. He was using the second for this particular war of words and, at about 9:15 p.m., Kandicee posted, “Calm down,” on Jones’ profile.

Neither Johnson nor Campbell had heard of Nathaniel Jones, but Kedarie’s friends told Campbell that around the time of his death, he had been talking to someone he knew who was using a fake Facebook page.

One year after Iowa teen’s murder, community refuses to forget

With his backpack and his borrowed bras, Kedarie left his friend’s house just after 10 p.m. and gave his mom a call. He said he was heading home but might stop quickly at the Hy-Vee near their apartment. That wasn’t unusual; he often used the Wi-Fi there.

The last thing he said to her was, “See you later, Ma. I love you.”

“To know that his ‘see you later’ actually meant ‘see you later,’ I can’t get that back,” Katrina Johnson said through sobs during a recent interview at her house.

Soon after Kedarie ended the call, Hy-Vee's surveillance cameras recorded a red car pulling up beside him.

A man named 'Lumni'

For two weeks leading up to March 2, Sanders-Galvez and Purham lived off and on at a house on Madison Avenue, less than 2 miles from the alley where Kedarie's body was found.

Sanders-Galvez’s mother is from Burlington, Campbell said, but she’d moved away. The man known as “Lumni” grew up near St. Louis, but his grandparents still live in the Burlington area, and the 23-year-old visited often. He has at least one child, a 3-year-old, who lives in town.

Sanders-Galvez’s criminal history in Iowa started at age 17, with curfew violations and disorderly conduct. By age 20, he had moved on to car theft and assault for punching a woman he was seeing and pushing her down a flight of stairs.

In Missouri, he has convictions for theft of a controlled substance and, just a few months after Kedarie’s slaying, unlawful possession and use of a weapon.

He has filed for indigent defense in his first-degree murder case. His previously filed child-support papers list no job and no savings.

On March 2, Purham bought a prepaid cellphone. Later, he asked his pregnant girlfriend, Malaka Samuel, who sometimes lived at the house on Madison Avenue, to borrow her red, 2010 Chevrolet Impala.

In the early evening hours, he dropped her off at a Burlington-area homeless shelter and drove away.

The missing minutes

About 1½ hours before Kedarie was gunned down in that dark alley, Hy-Vee surveillance footage picked up a teen walking alone, wearing a black-colored hoodie, black leggings, a pink headband and braided hair.

Kedarie's apartment was just a few blocks away from the store, and the alley where he would be killed was a few blocks in the other direction.

Soon after the teen came into the surveillance camera's view, a red Chevy Impala pulled up next to him. Inside were Sanders-Galvez and Purham, court documents say, and investigators believe the person the men picked up was Kedarie.

What happened between that moment and when gunshots rang out behind Jenna Sansone’s garage roughly 90 minutes later isn't clear.

Neither Johnson nor Campbell know the two men charged with Kedarie's murder and aren't sure why the teenager would have been with them that night.

Johnson said Cedric, her younger son, used to see Sanders-Galvez hanging out on Maple Street, one of the neighborhood's main drags and home to a local church's community center, which Kedarie used to frequent.

Authorities won't discuss when Kedarie might have put on the women’s clothing he was wearing when he was killed or any other details about the missing hour and a half before his death.

With no facts to fill in the time gap, rumors have swirled in the tight-knit South Hill neighborhood.

A tipster told police she read Facebook messages that said Kedarie had been raped and forced to perform oral sex, according to court documents.

The messages went on to say that Purham and Sanders-Galvez had “urinated and defecated on Kedarie’s body” and then poured bleach "to get rid of any DNA evidence."

Defense attorney Curtis Dial declined to discuss allegations of sexual assault, but said his team has received “thousands of Facebook messages.”

A digital footprint

The investigation into Kedarie's slaying would eventually include more than 100 interviews with at least 60 people and about 300 pieces of evidence.

Police focused on Sanders-Galvez and Purham within a few days after the shooting, Burlington Detective Eric Short said. But by March 3, the day after the killing, they had already left the area.

Kedarie’s friends and family, meanwhile, readied for his funeral, which would take place on March 9. A standing-room-only crowd at his high school gymnasium laughed at memories of him, sang his favorite gospel hymns and cried lots of tears for “a life taken too soon,” as Katrina Johnson puts it.

The next day, police executed a search warrant on the home on Madison Avenue where Sanders-Galvez and Purham had been known to stay.

They found a book bag containing Kedarie Johnson’s high school ID, “a substance consistent with blood in several locations” and a box of garbage bags that Detective Short wrote matched the bag tied so tightly over Kedarie’s head.

They also collected ammunition, bedding, a hammer, a fake fingernail and used condoms.

Court records then show police slowly piecing together the digital footprint of what happened March 2. They discovered Sanders-Galvez and Purham had been calling and texting each other in the hours before and after Kedarie’s death.

And with the help of GPS technology, detectives placed Sanders-Galvez’s phone “in the vicinity of the area where Kedarie Johnson’s body was located minutes before reports of shots fired.”

The pick-up

While both men regularly contacted people in Burlington, they stayed away for a while.

On March 11, Burlington police put out a search warrant for the red Impala registered to Purham’s pregnant girlfriend.

Just before midnight a few days later, officers from the Florissant, Missouri, Police Department attempted to stop the car.

The driver — who court records show was Purham — fled, leading police on a “high-speed pursuit through the cities of Florissant and Ferguson” that ended when he crashed the Impala into a police car.

“A .357 Smith and Wesson Magnum-style revolver” was found “in plain sight” on the driver’s side floorboard, records show.

Ballistics testing at the Iowa DCI lab later "determined the projectiles removed from Kedarie Johnson’s body were fired from the .357 revolver,” according to the court records.

During a March 15 interview with police, Purham confirmed that he and Sanders-Galvez were driving the red Impala and picked up a “petite African-American female wearing a black-colored hoodie and braided hair."

Police: Kedarie Johnson’s murder ‘not a random act'

Purham said shortly after the pair picked up “the girl,” Purham was dropped off at a friend’s house, and Sanders-Galvez and "the girl" drove away together.

Sanders-Galvez was apprehended about a month later in St. Louis.

In an interview with police on April 12, Sanders-Galvez denied picking up anyone outside the Hy-Vee, according to court documents. Instead, he said he and Purham went back to the house on Madison Avenue and stayed all night.

He said he didn’t know Kedarie and learned about his death on Facebook.

Citing the pending court case, Dial, the police and Des Moines County Attorney Amy Beavers declined to discuss the discrepancies between the statements of Sanders-Galvez and Purham.

If Sanders-Galvez is convicted of first-degree murder, he faces a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole. Should an indictment on a hate crimes charge be handed down in federal court, he could face the death penalty.

The same is true for Purham, who is being held in St. Louis on charges related to the high-speed chase. No timeframe has been set for his extradition, Beavers said.

The black and gold urn

Almost two years after Kedarie's death, Johnson still has his toothbrush. She can’t bear to throw it away, she said.

His clothes are still in her closet. She refuses to wash them for fear they would lose his scent.

The posters and signs his friends made in the days after the shooting pepper her wall. And Kedarie's favorite blanket plays cushion to the teddy bears, silk flowers and knickknacks left at the crime scene.

On her mantel sits an ornate black and gold urn holding Kedarie's ashes, topped with one of his favorite hats. Johnson chose to have Kedarie cremated because she couldn’t stand to see her “baby put in the ground.”

On her “bad days,” when her emotions threaten to engulf her, Johnson watches the videos of Kedarie she has saved on her phone. One of her favorites is one where he lip-syncs “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston as he cheeses for the camera.

“When all you have left to go on is pictures and the (photographic) memories and the videos and stuff that you have in your phone, it’s, like, it’s never enough,” she said, through heaving sobs.

“I can never feel that warmth anymore," she said.

Sometimes when she is by herself and lost in her thoughts, she’ll wonder what would have happened if they stayed in Chicago and not left for “a better start.”

The windy city’s gay community sticks together, she said, and Kedarie may have found a place to call his own in that.

Now, though, she doesn’t have time to dream about a different life. She’s got to focus her energy on keeping her emotions under control in court. She’s not going to mess up this chance at justice for her son, she said.

“I have been strong this far and they say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” she said. “Out of this, I will build a stronger life for the two kids I have left.”

Looking over at the urn on the mantelpiece, she adds: “There will be better and brighter days ahead.”