KEOKUK, Ia. — It took a jury just 90 minutes Friday to return a guilty verdict in the murder of Burlington High School junior Kedarie Johnson, a gender-fluid teenager whose case attracted national attention.

The jury found Jorge Sanders-Galvez, 23, guilty of first-degree murder in the slaying of Kedarie, who was found dead in an alley with two bullet holes in his chest around 11:30 p.m. March 2, 2016.

Kedarie had been gagged, his head covered by a garbage bag and his body doused in bleach.

Sanders-Galvez will be officially sentenced December 18 and faces mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole. His “good friend,” cousin and co-defendant, Jaron Purham, also is charged with first-degree murder and will be tried separately.

Sitting in the front row of the gallery, Katrina Johnson, Kedarie’s mom, shook her leg nervously and played with the tissue in her hand as she awaited the verdict.

Upon hearing the verdict, Katrina brought both hands to her face and sobbed silently. Her husband, Demetrius Perkins, held her shoulders.

As the lawyers discussed sentencing, she dropped her hands and smiled widely, wiping away the heavy tears that streamed down her face.

After the hearing, Katrina hugged and thanked the prosecuting attorneys. Declining to speak with the media, she called Kedarie's friends and family members who couldn't be at the hearing.

"Justice was served for my baby!" she could be heard saying in the hallway.

Sanders-Galvez looked straight ahead, closing his eyes, but not displaying any visible emotion. He was shackled within minutes of the jury leaving.

Defense attorneys had elected to move forward with sentencing Friday until Des Moines County Attorney Amy Beavers indicated Katrina might want to make a victim-impact statement.

Attorney Curtis Dial then said they would delay.

“The trial went as expected and there weren’t a lot of surprises,” Dial said as he left the courthouse.

Beavers said she was “somewhat” surprised by the speed of the verdict, but was happy the jury came back with “the decision that was clearly supported by the evidence.”

“The malice in this crime was extreme and the jury obviously saw that,” Beavers said. “The defendant going to prison for the rest of his life is clearly warranted in this case.”

Federal help 'invaluable'

Kedarie's murder gained national attention in recent weeks when U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions initiated federal involvement and dispatched trial attorney Christopher J. Perras to aid in the case, according to the Department of Justice.

“The federal authorities are investigating the case as a federal hate crime, and so they would like to be part of the state case for seamless prosecution, should an indictment in federal court be handed down,” Beavers said in October of adding Perras.

Neither Perras nor Beavers would comment on whether federal charges would be handed down in the case.

Beavers said she hopes Perras will be back for Purham’s trial, but that the decision would “be made at a future time.”

“It was invaluable to us to have Mr. Perras on our team and the assistance of the federal authorities,” Beavers said. Assistant Iowa Attorney General Laura Roan also worked on the case.

Sanders-Galvez’s trial lasted nine days with two days of jury selection. The trial was moved from Des Moines County in May due to pre-trial publicity and moved again last month from Henry County to Lee County to ensure a diverse jury pool.

The jury was made up of 11 Caucasians and 1 African-American, who was the only person of color in the jury pool.

'All hell broke loose'

Throughout trial, prosecutors maintained that Sanders-Galvez and Purham saw Kedarie in the Hy-Vee near his house March 2 and thought he was a biological female.

On the night of the murder, Kedarie was wearing women’s leggings and flowing hair extensions held in place with a pink headband.

Then, prosecutors said, the pair formed a plan to pick him up and take him back to 2610 Madison Ave. to have sex — a place where the state alleged the men often had intimate contact with women.

After discovering that Kedarie wasn’t biologically female, prosecutors said the men became “enraged,” stuffed a plastic bag down Kedarie's throat, covered his mouth tightly with a ripped T-shirt and eventually brought him to an alley, where he was shot and killed.

“This boy … who was trying to find his way in the world, wasn’t just gunned down — he was tortured,” Roan said during her closing arguments.

“He was dumped like a piece of trash,” she said. “Shot twice — execution-style — and left there, poured with bleach — doused in it — at 16 years old. That’s malice. That’s extra.”

Despite being central to the prosecution's motive, Kedarie’s gender-identity and sexual orientation weren’t discussed much at trial. The state instead focused on the physical and digital evidence that connected Kedarie to the two men.

But in her closing statements, Roan said the murder was carried out “because Kedarie Johnson wasn’t a girl.”

“He wasn’t only shot through the chest, he was shot through the bra,” Roan said, pointing to a crime scene photo of Kedarie’s wounds.

“They’ve pulled the crotch of the underwear aside as some sort of disgusting calling card,” she said. “They thought they were picking up this cute petite girl, but, oh, she wasn’t what they thought, and then all hell broke loose.”

A new scenario

During closing arguments, defense attorney Dial offered for the first time a different scenario: that Kedarie had gone to the alley for a sexual encounter and was killed by whoever he'd made arrangements to meet.

Dial pointed to the blades of grass found in Kedarie’s pants near his genitals, alleging that the grass meant that Kedarie’s pants must have down as he was “getting ready to have some sort of sexual activity in the alley.”

Sanders-Galvez took the stand in his own defense Thursday and maintained during his hourlong testimony that he didn’t know Kedarie and testified that he “did not kill Kedarie Johnson.”

He also testified about his version of what happened the night of the slaying, including adding a window of time when he said Purham left the house where they were hanging out.

Sanders-Galvez said he and Purham separated between 10:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. on March 2, which is when prosecutors say Kedarie was being suffocated in the upstairs bedroom at the Madison Avenue house the defendants often frequented.

Sanders-Galvez said he was at the Madison Avenue house during most of that hour, but that, as far as he knew, he was alone.

It’s counter-intuitive, Dial said, for Sanders-Galvez to place himself at one of the crime scenes if he wasn’t telling the truth.

“If he had tortured Kedarie Johnson out there,” Dial said, “it would be kind of odd to say, 'That’s the place he went to' — and he’s never denied being there.”

In statements to police after his arrest on April 12, 2016, Sanders-Galvez gave different versions of the evening's events.

Sanders-Galvez also testified Thursday the “cowboy gun” — a chrome, long-barreled six-shooter revolver — that he bought on Facebook was not for him, but for Purham.

A firearm expert previously stated that the two bullets found in Kedarie's body were fired from that distinctive gun.

'The end of a chapter'

One of the first people Katrina called after getting the verdict was her son Cedric Peterson, said Nathan Williams, the family’s pastor. Peterson lives with Williams, and Williams was with him when he got the call.

Cedric and Kedarie were not only brothers, they were best friends, Katrina had previously said. Unlike Katrina, who remembers her son by reminiscing about him, Nathan said that Cedric rarely talks about his brother, because he “doesn’t want to live and relive what happened.”

“Cedric takes things in stride; he just took the news in, told us matter-of-factly, and then said he was going out to rake some more leaves,” Williams said. “That’s Cedric’s way of dealing with this — 'I am not going to sit and grieve and moan, and I’m not going to jump around in hysterics.'”

For Williams, the verdict brought about mixed emotions. It’s sad when anyone has to spend the rest of his or her life in prison, he said, but he’s “thrilled” for Katrina and Cedric.

“For the first time in a long time, they can breathe a sigh of relief,” he said. “They can go to sleep tonight knowing that, ‘OK, you know, the story is not over, but we’ve reached the end of the chapter.”