Hayward -- One of three men accused of killing a 17-year-old Newark transgender nearly three years ago testified today that he participated in the attack after learning that Gwen Araujo was not the woman he thought he'd had sex with. Testifying for the first time at his retrial on murder charges, Jose Merel, 25, said he was disgusted when friends at a party revealed that Araujo, who called herself Lida and with whom Merel had previously had anal sex, was biologically male. "It's hard to explain," Merel said in a Hayward courtroom of the way he felt on Oct. 3,...
