Murder of Dan Markel

Dan Markel, a law professor at Florida State University's College of Law, was shot at his home in Tallahassee, Florida, shortly before 11 a.m. on July 18, 2014, and died of his injuries early the next day. Markel held the D'Alemberte Professorship at FSU, where he had taught since 2005 after clerking for a federal appeals judge and practicing white-collar criminal defense in Washington, D.C. He had built a national reputation for scholarship on punishment and criminal justice. Tallahassee police described him as the intended victim and treated his death as a murder from the start. The Associated Press later reported that the police response to the shooting had been delayed after a 911 dispatcher misclassified the initial call as less serious than it was.

The case went unsolved for nearly two years. Investigators eventually built a case using cellphone, banking, and toll-record data, along with security-camera and bus footage, that placed two men, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera, in a rented Toyota Prius near Markel's home on the morning of the shooting. Garcia was arrested in May 2016, and a Leon County grand jury indicted both Garcia and Rivera the following month. According to the unsealed probable-cause affidavit, investigators concluded the killing was a contract killing arranged through Katherine Magbanua, who had two children with Garcia and was in a relationship with Charlie Adelson, the brother of Markel's ex-wife. Prosecutors alleged that Charlie Adelson and his mother, Donna Adelson, paid Garcia and Rivera to kill Markel so that Markel's ex-wife could gain full custody of the couple's two sons and relocate with them to the Miami area, following a contentious divorce in which Markel had won a court order blocking such a move.

Rivera pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in October 2016 and was sentenced to 19 years in prison. Magbanua was arrested and charged with murder that same month. In October 2019, a combined trial ended with Garcia convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder; he was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. The jury deadlocked on Magbanua's charges, and a mistrial was declared. Magbanua was convicted at her 2022 retrial of first-degree murder, conspiracy, and solicitation of murder, and sentenced to life in prison plus two consecutive 30-year terms. Charlie Adelson was arrested in April 2022 and convicted in November 2023, receiving a life sentence plus 30 additional years each for conspiracy and solicitation; a Florida appeals court affirmed his convictions in July 2026. Donna Adelson was arrested in November 2023 at Miami International Airport, where she was allegedly attempting to board a one-way flight to Vietnam. Following a trial delayed by her attorney's withdrawal, she was convicted in September 2025 and sentenced to life imprisonment the following month, becoming the fifth and final defendant convicted in the case.

The case also had a legislative aftermath. In the years following the 2016 arrests, Markel's parents lost contact with their grandsons, whose surname was later changed from Markel to Adelson. The Florida Legislature subsequently passed a law, known informally as the Markel Act, expanding grandparents' legal standing to seek court-ordered visitation; Governor Ron DeSantis signed it in 2022.