Remembering Our Dead

Lauryn Paige Fuller

Lauryn was stabbed more than 60 times in the head and torso after a night of drinking, intimacy and recreational drug use in her attacker's van.

Five days later Gamaliel Mireles Coria, 28, was charged with her murder.

It's just weeks before Christmas, but outside it feels like spring. The sky is clear and bright, and there is a south wind whisking through the trees outside the Travis County Courthouse. Upstairs, in Judge John Wisser's 299th District Court, a pretrial hearing in the case of State of Texas v. Gamaliel Mireles Coria has just ended. The 28-year-old murder defendant sits next to his attorney, Robert Icenhauer-Ramirez, at the defense table, a distant look in his intense brown eyes. He doesn't show much emotion at all really, aside from recoiling nervously when several journalists begin taking notes, snapping pictures, and collecting footage for the evening news. The hearing was short, not even 10 minutes in duration, because final DNA tests the state requested last spring still aren't in. Preliminary results, though, indicate that blood found on defendant Coria's clothing and in the white conversion van he was driving on January 7 and 8, 1999, match the blood of the victim, 18-year-old [deadname].

Finally a trial date is set: March 16, 2000, one year and three months after the beaten and bloody body of Fuller was found barely hidden beneath some brush outside the entrance to the Tokyo Electron Corporation in Southeast Austin. There were more than 60 stab wounds on Fuller, including a two-inch-deep slashing stab wound just above the young [woman]'s rectum and a nine-inch-long slice to [her] neck -- the wound that ultimately killed [her] - which opened [her] up from Adam's apple to spinal cord.

Lauryn's family cremated her body rather than bury her as herself.

Fuller's body was cremated in early January because, according to Fuller's mother Kathy, as reported in the daily on January 14, "We couldn't have dressed [her] in a wig like a female, and it was the only way [she] would have wanted to be presented," she said. "We brought the ashes home. [She]'s finally at rest."

https://www.austinchronicle.com/features/2000-02-18/75904/

https://www.foto8.com/issue08/scottfuller1.html

http://www.albanylawreview.org/Articles/Vol78_3/78.3.0927%20Wodda%20and%20Panfil.PDF

Report added: 22 Dec 2018. Last updated: 10 Oct 2021

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