Juju Nadeau
Age 215 Aug 2026
Portland, Maine (USA)
Stabbed
Juju died in hospital after being stabbed by an assailant riding a bicycle. Initial media coverage misgendered and deadnamed her.
On the evening of August 5, Juju Nadeau was walking with friends along Back Cove Trail, a wooded path wedged between the water and Interstate 295 in Portland, Maine. As an avid urban explorer, the 21-year-old wanted to show her gaggle of friends one of the pieces of graffiti under Tukey’s Bridge, which her loved ones tell Them was one of her favorite spots to visit.
But what was supposed to be a fun adventure ended abruptly after a man on a bicycle, later identified by police as Glen Rodney, 58, allegedly approached the group and began wielding a knife, per court documents. The same documents obtained by The Portland Press Herald alleged that Rodney fatally stabbed Nadeau in the chest after chasing her and her friends. According to a GoFundMe, Liz McGehee, one of Nadeau’s close friends who was there at the time, tried to pull the assailant off of her and called 911. Nadeau died later at Maine Medical Center.
In the aftermath, initial media coverage misgendered and deadnamed Nadeau, a common macroaggression trans people face after becoming the victim of a violent crime. But for Kasper DeWitt, Juju’s partner of two years, she was so much more than a name in a headline. To her loved ones, DeWitt says, Nadeau lit up the world. She was “divine.”
“It sounds cliche but she’s the most loving person,” DeWitt tells Them. “She was an angel sent here to make things better — and she did.”
Before meeting Nadeau during the summer of 2024, DeWitt, who uses they/she pronouns, said they had spent hours playing video games and in online spaces with other furries, but tells Them they had never really engaged in the real-life side of the subculture, like attending conventions. That all changed once she and Nadeau started dating. Though furries are a famously online subculture, Nadeau valued meeting her community in real life, partying, and making friends everywhere she went, especially at furry cons across New England.
In addition to being a furry, DeWitt says that Nadeau was also a fennec fox therian. Though therian identity can be broad, many therains identify strongly as animals or other non-human beings. For Nadeau, DeWitt says this translated into her other-worldly effervescence and magnetic presidence. She embodied that playfulness, frequently barking, meowing, and even saying her own name, “Juju,” as DeWitt woke her up from a nap, just “like a Pokemon,” they recalled. For Nadeau, who held both her furry and her therian identities close to her heart, being in touch with community felt valuable and important.
“It makes me sad because, obviously I'm sad about a lot, but I think that she experienced socially more than a lot of people ever will in their life,” DeWitt says. “It's horrible because she would have had the chance to live 10 times that much.”
Her loved ones plan to honor her energy by sewing some of Nadeau’s fursuit into their own, retiring the well-loved hyena by burning it, and throwing the biggest party ever.
“She was a massive party girl and I know that she would have wanted me to throw literally the biggest party I've ever thrown ever for her — and that's my plan,” DeWitt says.
https://www.pghlesbian.com/2026/08/trans-woman-juju-nadeau-killed-by-a-stranger-on-a-hiking-trail/
https://www.them.us/news/juju-nadeau-homicide
https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/08/13/trans-death-juju-nadeau-maine-stabbing/
