The Trump admin touted him as a victim of #MeToo. Now he's accused of dismembering a girlfriend [View all]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/alameda-murder-joseph-roberts-18380333.php

No paywall
https://archive.ph/BLvac

The gruesome discovery spoke to a ghastly crime.

On the afternoon of July 20, someone using a waterfront trail in Alameda spotted a large garbage bag wrapped in duct tape that smelled as if it was full of dead fish from the bay. When responding officers looked inside, they found the dismembered remains of a young woman whose head, hands and feet had been removed.

Investigators would extract a pair of DNA profiles from the duct tape on the bag. One belonged to Rachel Imani Buckner, a young mother and spoken-word poet who had just graduated from a San Francisco law school. The other, police now say, belonged to her killer — her boyfriend and onetime law school classmate Joseph Carl Roberts, suspected of using an electric saw to try to obscure his victim’s identity.

But as shocking as the crime was, the back-story was even stranger.

Roberts, it turns out, was once touted by the Trump administration as a poster child for the purported excesses of the “#MeToo” movement and the reckoning over sexual assault at American colleges. Kicked off the campus of Savannah State University in Georgia, the U.S. Navy veteran not only survived but turned the episode into a dramatic story about a different kind of victim: himself.

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