MIAMI \u2014 A 16-year-old boy has been charged with murder and aggravated sexual abuse in Florida in the death of his 18-year-old stepsister on a Carnival Cruise ship, the U.S. Justice Department said Monday.<\/p>\n
The teen, identified by the government as T.H., was initially charged as a juvenile on Feb. 2, but the case was sealed until U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom ordered that he would be prosecuted as an adult, the department said.<\/p>\n
An email and voicemail seeking comment from T.H.\u2019s lawyer about the indictment were not immediately returned.<\/p>\n
Anna Kepner had been traveling on the Carnival Horizon ship in November with her family. Before the ship was scheduled to return to Florida, her body was found concealed under a bed in a room she was sharing with two other teens, including the younger stepbrother.<\/p>\n
The cause of death was determined to be mechanical asphyxia, which is when an object or physical force stops someone from breathing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI \u2014 A 16-year-old boy has been charged with murder and aggravated sexual abuse in Florida in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-230047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}