14-year-old girl charged in death of anti-human trafficking activist’s daughter

Los Angeles police arrested a 14-year-old girl and killed a woman who was shot on a street corner in South LA early this morning

The teenager is accused of shooting 20-year-old Kendra McIntyre just before 4:30 a.m. March 21 as she stood at the intersection of 70th and Figueroa streets, the Los Angeles Police Department claimed in a news release Tuesday .

The suspect was identified Monday by LAPD homicide detectives and taken into custody at a police station less than a mile from the scene of the shooting. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office has charged a teenager identified only as Liniya M. with the murder of McIntyre, but there was no information about a motive or whether the girl acted alone.

She was arraigned Wednesday morning and ordered to remain in custody by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, according to a spokesman for the DA’s office. Liniya M. is scheduled to return to court later this month.

Homicide investigators did not provide any information about why McIntyre was standing on that particular street corner two hours before dawn.

McIntyre’s mother, Debra Rush, believes her daughter was being forced to sell sex by South LA gang members when she was shot. Homicide investigators have provided no information about what McIntyre was doing in a part of South L.A. known as a sex trafficking corridor.

Years earlier, Rush was in the same part of South LA

In the mid-2000s, Rush was kidnapped from her Fresno home and forced into sex work to pay off her mother’s drug debts, she told the Times. One of the places her captors made her work was Figueroa Street. She eventually ran away and found her way back to Fresno.

Rush is the founder of the nonprofit Breaking the Chains, an organization that seeks to connect sex trafficking victims with resources that can help them find housing and other services to escape their traffickers. Rush founded the organization in the San Joaquin Valley, where McIntyre grew up, Rush wrote in Facebook posts honoring her daughter.

“Kendra was an all-around amazing person; extremely loyal, beautifully artistic, hilarious, outgoing and loving,” Rush wrote in a post.

In a message posted to the Breaking the Chains Facebook page Wednesday, Rush thanked the LAPD for “working tirelessly to bring about peace for her family,” but added that in her world There is still grief and “no justice can fill the void” of losing her daughter. She wrote that her daughter experienced trauma as a child and suffered from “severe mental health issues.”

Growing up, McIntyre’s life revolved around painting, cheerleading and the English dramas and films she made in her free time. During her teenage years, she went through a phase where she spoke only with a British accent, her mother recalled. She graduated high school at 16 and worked as an environmental worker in a hospital.

Photos of McIntyre often showed her flashing a wide smile. But Rush said behind the happy exterior lies a deep source of pain and mental health issues.

The lives of mother and daughter were marked by recurring abuse and violence. Rush suspects that some of her daughter’s problems stem from sexual abuse by a caregiver. She also recalled an incident at the height of the pandemic in 2020 in which she said McIntyre was the victim of a violent home invasion. Two suspects broke in while she was home alone and attacked her.

“She was alone with them for 45 minutes, and I don’t want to go into details,” Rush said.

The suspects were charged and McIntyre testified at their trial, a harrowing experience that her mother said sent her into a downward spiral. Her daughter was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which Rush said made her situation worse.

“That’s when we kind of lost Kendra,” her mother said.

Her daughter began having violent outbursts and became withdrawn, Rush said. No longer feeling safe in her home, McIntyre left town earlier this year and ended up in LA, Rush said.

Through her own experiences, Rush became an advocate for the anti-human trafficking community and caught the attention of lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington. Although Rush encouraged her daughter to learn from Rush’s experiences, McIntyre still found herself in the same situation, her mother said.

Family friends started a GoFundMe campaign to help Rush pay funeral costs.

Anyone with information about the shooting can contact LAPD South Bureau Homicide Division investigators at (323) 786-5100. Anonymous tips can be submitted to LA Regional Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (800-222-8477) or www.lacrimestoppers.org.

Times staff writer Libor Jany contributed to this report.