The U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday that a 16-year-old Florida teenager has been formally indicted on charges of murder and aggravated sexual abuse connected to the November death of his 18-year-old step-sister aboard a Carnival cruise ship.
Identified in court documents only as T.H. to protect his minor status prior to adult prosecution, the teen was first charged as a juvenile in early February. The proceedings remained sealed until U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom granted prosecutors’ request to move forward with trying the defendant as an adult, opening the case to public disclosure.
The victim, Anna Kepner, was an 18-year-old high school cheerleader at Temple Christian School in Titusville, Florida, a small community roughly 40 miles east of Orlando. Kepner was traveling with her family on the Carnival Horizon cruise liner when her body was discovered shortly before the vessel was set to return to its home port in Florida. She had been sharing a room with two other teenagers, including her younger stepbrother, and her body was found hidden under a bed in that shared accommodation.
An official autopsy determined Kepner’s cause of death on November 6 was mechanical asphyxia, a form of suffocation caused by physical force or an obstruction that cuts off a person’s ability to breathe.
In an official statement following the indictment, U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones expressed condolences to the victim’s loved ones, saying, “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family during this unimaginable loss.” He added that a federal grand jury had returned the indictment covering the serious charges, which were alleged to have occurred on a cruise ship operating in international waters.
At Kepner’s memorial service held shortly after her death, family members asked attendees to forgo traditional black mourning attire in favor of bright clothing, a tribute to what they described as her “bright and beautiful soul.”
The transfer of T.H.’s case to federal court for adult prosecution is an unusual step. Juvenile prosecutions are almost always handled at the state level in the U.S., and federal cases involving teenage defendants are extremely rare. Legal experts explain the federal jurisdiction stems from the fact that Kepner’s death occurred in international waters, which falls under federal maritime law rather than state judicial authority.
T.H. was first spotted at a Miami federal courthouse in February, where he arrived wearing a baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt pulled up to obscure most of his face. Details of his initial court status were not publicly released at the time, as U.S. privacy laws restrict public disclosures about juvenile defendants.
Court records show that on February 6, a judge ordered T.H. to wear an electronic monitoring ankle tether while he stays in the home of his uncle ahead of trial. The monitoring order was later modified to grant him permission to work temporarily alongside his father at a landscaping business.