Source: Women are Human
US — Queens, New York. A twice-convicted killer who has spent most of his life in prison is currently being held on suspicion of an October 2020 shooting inside a subway station, and on a separate incident of gunpoint robbery.
The 59-year-old, who described himself in a 2019 prison interview as “a transgender woman” named “Miss Rona Sugar Love” who “was born Alberto Rodriguez Marrero in Puerto Rico,” was walking with a woman on Sunday, October 18.
Just before 6 PM, the duo came across a 24-year-old man urinating on the uptown platform at the 14th St West Side I.R.T. subway station in Greenwich Village, Queens.
The 24-year-old, who is believed to be homeless, made a remark to the woman that Mr Love did not like.
Mr Love allegedly took out a gun and shot the 24-year-old in the neck, back and torso.
The 24-year-old managed to walk to the Lenox Health Greenwich Village emergency department, where he was treated.
Video of the suspect was captured by a bystander using the Citizen crime reporting app. Police released to the public video stills of the suspect.
Mr Love was arrested on October 30.
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said Mr Love is also facing charges related to a Queens gunpoint robbery.
Mr Love has served a total of 40 years in prison, which started when he was aged 18. His longest prison stays were as a result of the 1992 murder of a woman Mr Love shot in the head and the 1994 murder of a man Mr Love stabbed 42 times.
At age 19, Mr Love was put on cross-sex hormones at his request while serving out his first prison stint.
In the March 2019 interview “Her Name is Rona” with Audio Journalist Emily Liu, which was made while Mr Love was an inmate at the maximum security prison Sing-Sing, Mr Love lamented the difficulties of being incarcerated with men. He said he attempted suicide several times by overdosing on pills and cutting “veins,” and was taken to the prison’s mental health unit when he “lost it.”
Interviewer Ms Liu wrote sympathetically:
I first started looking into this story after the Trump administration launched a spate of attacks on transgender rights in 2018. Last May, the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced that they were going to make it default for transgender people to be housed in prisons that matched their sex assigned at birth. That’s what led me to Rona.
Prison is, by all accounts, a pretty terrible place for everyone. But being a transgender woman in a men’s facility means that Rona’s life inside has been especially difficult.
According to Ms Liu, the inmates faced such challenges as being addressed as “mister” by corrections officials, and being denied bras, panties, makeup, long hair and cross-sex hormones. The inmate also alleged that prison doctors called him an anti-gay slur.
In July 2019, three months following release, Mr Love made wild allegations about his prison stay during a rambling interview with the New York Trans Oral History Project (NYC TOHP) (PDF). According to Mr Love, he had been “tortured by mental health staff,” who put him “in strait jackets” and held him in a “quiet room, the rubber room,” which had windowless doors, and “drugged up” and “raped” him there. He also claimed to have been “physically and sexually abused” by other inmates and by corrections officers, alleging corrections officers even rammed a baton up his rectum during one incident.
While Mr Love told Ms Liu he did not commit murder, he told the NYC TOHP that he committed justifiable homicide against individuals responsible for the kidnappings and two-year captivity of he and his twin sister, and the death of the twin. Mr Love said he spent the majority of his childhood – “nine years” – in a mental institution.
Mr Love’s bizarre stories do not appear to have been substantiated.
