The People of California v. Dana Rivers
October 14, 2022
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The murder trial of Dana Rivers is scheduled to begin on Monday, October 17 at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time. To date, there has been very little media coverage of the brutal murder of a lesbian couple and their teenage son. The media did a reasonable job of covering the case when it began in 2016 and up until 2018, and then the media largely went silent.
In 2021, I began to track developments. I got in touch with the prosecuting attorney, who was fairly responsive over email and in phone calls, but there were often long lapses in communication. I was placed on the notification list for the victim advocate, and began receiving email messages when there were developments in the case. I started tracking all of it on my website.
My understanding is that you can livestream the trial here, using the link for the René C. Davidson courthouse. I have not been able to confirm that the livestream will be available.
This is the total of what I know about the underlying facts of the case (as framed on my website):
Dana Rivers was born David Warfield. In 1999, he claimed that he was a woman and underwent surgery to persuade others that he was, in fact, a woman. At the time, he was a high school teacher. He openly discussed his fetish with his teenage students and was subsequently fired. He sued, and the case settled.
Just after midnight on November 11, 2016, police received reports about gunshots being fired at a home on Dunbar Drive, in Oakland, California. When they responded, they found Rivers drenched in blood and running from the doorway of the house. He was in possession of knives, ammunition, and metal knuckles. The house was on fire. Inside the house, the police found two women whose bodies were riddled with bullets and stab wounds. They also found a young man laid out in front of the house who had been shot to death. Rivers has been charged with numerous serious and violent offenses, including murder and arson.
The victims: Patricia Wright and Charlotte Reed, a married lesbian couple, and Toto Diambu (known as Benny Diambu-Wright), their 19-year-old son.
Previously, Rivers had been active in “Camp Trans,” a campaign against the rights of lesbians to hold the women-only annual festival called “Michfest” on private land (the last official Michfest occurred in 2015). Patricia and Charlotte were regular attendees at Michfest.
EDIT: A thoughtful reader reminded me that the actual title of the festival was Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and I’m adding that here.
His plea is not guilty by reason of insanity.
This is all of the information that is publicly available related to Rivers’s inmate status at the Santa Rita Jail as of today (unchanged since he was booked in 2016, as far as I know).
You can see all of the pending charges on the right (the acronym PC refers to “penal code” and the names of the charges follow). The main charges are murder, arson, and various weapons charges, and the rest are special enhancements.
I have been asked if he is being held in a women’s prison. The answer is that he is being held in a mixed-sex jail, pretrial, and that the jail classifies him as being female (you can see it in the “Sex F” in the image above). If he is convicted he will be sent to a state prison and under California state law, he has the right to apply to be held in the women’s prison.
If you go to the court calendar, you will see this:
16-CR-014089 is the court case number. I don’t know what the other numbers refer to. The October 2022 dates listed are the dates of the trial. The November 2016 date is the date of the criminal court case filing.
All of the information in the images above is available to the public, so I’m not sharing anything private. Instructions on how members of the public can find all of the most recent information are on my website.
I should also note that it’s possible that the trial will be continued. It has already been continued numerous times. Whether or not to continue the trial is in the sole discretion of the trial judge.
The case has (finally) received some recent media attention here and here. My understanding is that both outlets intend to follow the trial next week and to continue reporting. I really hope that they do.
Countless women in the U.S. and all over the world want justice for the victims of these terrible slayings. Hopefully, next week we will find out if we will get it.
If you haven’t, please consider signing the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. You can find the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International here.
Check out my book The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls, also available on Audible.