Two Women Sentenced to Life Without Parole for the Murder of Sam Nordquist

Sam Nordquist was 24. He was a Black trans man from Oakdale, Minnesota, and before he left for New York he worked at the Riesco group homes in Little Canada, supporting people with disabilities. His mother Linda has described him as “a wonderful person, all full of life,” someone who “would take his shirt off his back if you needed it more than he did.”

He left Minnesota on 28 September 2024 to meet a woman he had met online, in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. His family lost contact with him on 1 January 2025. On 13 February 2025 his body was found in a field in Benton, in Yates County. He had been held in a motel in Hopewell for more than a month.

Last Tuesday, 8 September 2026, in Ontario County Court, the two women who prosecutors say were most responsible were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The sentences

Precious Arzuaga, 40, pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, conspiracy, coercion, concealment of a human corpse and endangering the welfare of a child. Jennifer Quijano, 32, pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, conspiracy, concealment of a human corpse and endangering the welfare of a child. Ontario County Court Judge Kristina Karle, who imposed Arzuaga’s sentence, handed down the maximum the law allows: life without parole.

Prosecutors said Arzuaga organised what happened and enlisted at least six other adults. She was the woman Sam had travelled to New York to be with. Investigators said she cut off or severely restricted his contact with his family in Minnesota; during the few phone calls they did have with him, relatives said he was tight-lipped and seemed to have been coached on what to say.

This report will not go through the details of what was done to him. The court record is public and extensive, and there is no version of recounting it that serves the people who loved him. What matters for the purposes of this story is that both defendants admitted it, that the pleas were to the full indictments, and that the sentences are the longest New York law permits.

Arzuaga wept during her sentencing and apologised to the family. “I can’t take back what happened, although I wish I could,” she said, adding that Sam “really did love me and my kids.” Quijano did not speak; her attorneys read a prepared statement acknowledging the family’s grief and expressing remorse. When Arzuaga was led out of the courtroom, people in the gallery applauded.

What the family said

Linda Nordquist read a victim impact statement aloud, along with letters addressed to both women. She spoke about losing a child and shared her favourite memory of her son.

His sister Kayla also read a statement. She told Spectrum News afterwards that the guilty pleas guarantee the two women will die in prison, but that she worries her family will never actually know what happened to her brother — that a plea closes a case without ever producing the full account a trial might have forced into the open.

“I was trying to be strong for him — not cry,” she said. Neither defendant has confirmed a motive. Prosecutors have suggested Quijano resented Arzuaga’s relationship with Sam, but that theory has not been admitted to by anyone involved.

The Nordquist family has been insistent, since the first week, about how this should be reported. In February 2025 they told the Star Tribune they hoped Sam would be remembered for who he was rather than how he died, and they have held to that line through nineteen months of hearings. Both Linda and Kayla have spoken at Rochester’s first Trans Pride Festival, where Kayla said that hearing Sam’s name carried forward “through something that brings people together means something that we can barely put into words.”

The rest of the case

Sam’s killing was a 2025 crime. Only the sentencing belongs to this year, and only part of it: five other people are still moving through the courts.

Kyle Sage pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and second-degree kidnapping last month and is scheduled to be sentenced in December. Emily Motyka pleaded guilty to the same charges in June; her sentencing has not been scheduled. Patrick Goodwin and Kimberly Sochia are due to stand trial in January. Thomas Eaves, Arzuaga’s adult son, is scheduled for trial in March. Arzuaga, Quijano and Sage also remain under federal investigation.

So the Nordquist family’s obligation to show up in a courtroom in western New York does not end here. It runs at minimum through next spring.

Why this case stayed visible

Sam Nordquist’s death drew national attention in February 2025 in a way that killings of trans people, and Black trans people in particular, usually do not. There was a vigil at the Minnesota State Capitol four days after his body was found. Legislators in his home state issued statements. Coverage was sustained rather than a single news cycle.

Some of that was the scale and the duration of what happened. Some of it was timing — the case broke in the opening weeks of a federal administration that had made hostility to trans people a governing priority, and it landed in that context whether or not anyone intended it to. Reporting later established that law enforcement had been called to the motel where Sam was held eight separate times, which raised questions about intervention that have not been fully resolved.

But the reason his name is still in circulation nineteen months later is mostly that his mother and sister kept saying it, in courtrooms and at Pride festivals and to any reporter who called. They are the reason there is anything here to write about beyond a case number.

The sentences handed down last week do not fix anything. What they do is settle one question — these two women will not be released — and leave the family with the harder, longer work of the rest of it.