Trinity Love Jones, age 9, was murdered by her mother, Taquesta Graham, and Graham’s boyfriend Emiel Hunt. Trinity was homeschooled.
Graham experienced child abuse or neglect and was performing sex work around age 18. Graham “pleaded no contest in 2009 to enticing a girl [under 16] for prostitution in San Bernardino County” and was placed on probation and the sex offender registry. Trinity was born in January 2010. In 2011, child services investigated Graham for abusing Trinity; the allegations were deemed unfounded/inconclusive. Trinity’s relatives described her as a social butterfly who loved fashion. Her father, Antonio Jones, said she was “full of character, full of life, full of joy.”
In 2016 Graham’s probation was revoked and she was sentenced to two years in prison. In December 2017, Graham began her relationship with Hunt, who had been convicted of torture and felony child abuse in San Diego County and “sentenced in 2005 to 12 years in state prison.” In May 2018, Hunt, Graham, and Trinity moved out of a relative’s home in Long Beach and lived in motels and in their vehicle for the next ten months. The couple pulled Trinity out of school to homeschool her and kept her isolated from family and friends, who called child services for help to no effect. Hunt and Graham starved Trinity and beat her, leaving her “scarred from head to toe.” She had a foot infection that made it hard for her to wear shoes, and in early 2019 Trinity experienced a head injury that caused her eyes to swell and made her lethargic.
Around the evening of February 28, 2019, or the morning of March 1, Trinity stopped breathing as a result of blunt force trauma and neglect. Hunt and Graham did not seek medical attention for her; instead they concealed her body in a duffel bag and dumped it in a wooded area. Trinity’s body was discovered by workers on March 5 and it took nearly a week to identify her. “Graham was arrested on an unrelated warrant March 8 at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Texas. Hunt was arrested a day later after he was found sleeping in his SUV near San Diego International Airport.” Graham and Hunt were charged with torture and murder.
Date: March 1, 2019
Location: Hacienda Heights, California
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