Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

After Dan Markel Murder Arrest, Friends Hope To Win Justice for Slain Law Professor

In July of 2014, a young Jewish law professor named Dan Markel was pulling into the driveway of his brick house on Trescott Drive in Tallahassee, Florida, when someone pointed a gun through the window of his Honda Accord and shot him in the head.

Markel died within hours, leaving behind two young sons, a vast network of friends, a promising academic career and a mystery that only now, two years later, is beginning to unravel.

In late May, Tallahassee police arrested Sigfredo Garcia, a 34-year-old with a long history of run-ins with the law. Garcia was charged with first-degree murder. His attorney maintains he is innocent.

So far, the arrest of Garcia has only raised new questions, and rocketed the grisly mystery back onto the front pages. How the lives of Markel and Garcia allegedly intersected that July day is far from clear. In a press conference shortly after the arrest, local police said that the investigation was still ongoing, and that court documents in the case had been sealed. The Tallahassee Democrat reported that investigators suspect a murder for hire.

Now, Markel’s survivors are hoping that the progress on the case brings some answers after years of uncertainty.

“Dan’s death left a hole in the lives of all his friends,” said Michael Goldenpine, a longtime friend of Markel’s. “No resolution to his murder can replace what we’ve lost, but it is at least heartening to know that justice may be served when it seemed for a long time that would not be the case.”

Markel was a smart, intellectually combative writer and professor; a specialist in the criminal law subspecialty of punishment theory and a leading voice among legal bloggers. He boasted a tight network of friends across the legal and academic law worlds. “He was like a human Grand Central Station, bustling with extraordinary energy to bring people together, using his blog in a self-effacing way to connect people with books, jobs, ideas, each other,” wrote Roderick Hills, a professor at the New York University School of Law, at the time of Markel’s death.

Born in Toronto, Markel attended Harvard University as an undergraduate before studying at Cambridge and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then receiving a law degree back at Harvard. At the time he was killed, he was a professor at the Florida State University College of Law. He was also a founder of PrawfsBlawg, a chatty academic blog covering legal issues.

In recent days, the current contributors at PrawfsBlawg have again been writing about Markel. In a May 26 post, PrawfsBlawg contributor Orly Lobel shared a speech she had made at a 2016 memorial ceremony held for Markel at Harvard. “Dan knew everybody and he wanted everyone he loved to know each other,” Lobel wrote. “We absorbed and internalized his sense of community and, with Dan as our leader, our glue, we connected.”

Lobel wrote that she and others were planning to continue a tradition of an academic law conference happy hour they called “MarkelFest” at an upcoming conference in early June.

Markel was battling with his ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, over the terms of their settlement agreement at the time of his murder. In a statement to the Tallahasee Democrat, Adelson welcomed Garcia’s arrest. “These past two years have been an extraordinarily difficult time for our family,” Adelson told the paper. “Although my children will always live with the tremendous loss of their father, my hope is that these new developments will finally bring some closure.”

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.