A man who changed his name from David Warfield to Dana Rivers will be housed with female inmates at a women’s prison in California following his sentencing for a triple murder.
In November, Rivers was convicted of a 2016 killing of three people in Oakland, California.
The bodies of two of Rivers’ victims were found stabbed and shot with a revolver, and the body of the third victim was found dead in a nearby street with gunshot wounds.
Rivers was also charged with arson for dousing the garage with gasoline and setting it on fire.
On June 14, Rivers was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
“It is a horrible thing to sentence someone to die in prison, and I don’t take that lightly,” Judge Scott Patton said in a court hearing, according to The Mercury News. “But this is the most depraved crime I ever handled in the criminal justice system in 33 years. Frankly, you deserve to spend the rest of your life in prison.”
Two days after his sentencing, Rivers was transferred to the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, The Daily Wire reported.
It’s not the first time the Golden State has placed men in women’s prisons.
Since 2021, nearly 50 male inmates who identify as transgender or “non-binary” have been allowed to transfer to women’s facilities in California, according to a report from The Washington Free Beacon.
Amie Ichikawa, founder of Women II Women, a group that fights for the human rights of incarcerated women, said women get “very anxious when a [trans-identifying man] gets processed in.”
In 1999, Rivers was fired from a teaching position at a Sacramento high school because he talked to students about his plans to undergo a sex change, something the district officials instructed him not to do.
Rivers eventually sued the school district and ended up resigning in exchange for a $150,000 settlement, according to The Daily Wire.
In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom approved Senate Bill No. 132, known as the “Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act.” The bill, authored by State Sen. Scott Wiener, enabled dangerous “trans women” to enter female-only prisons.
“I threw up when I heard that law,” Ichikawa said, according to the New York Post.
