Puerto Rican police are investigating the death of a transgender man who was found on January 9 with multiple gunshot wounds.
A motorist was driving on an unoccupied section of the freeway in Trujillo Alto, a municipality about 25 km southeast of San Juan, when she hit something, according to the local news website WAPA. When she got out of the car, she realized it was a corpse and informed the authorities who identified the victim as Samuel Edmund Damián Valentín.
Police initially mistakenly donated Damián, who listed his current home on Juncos, less than 20 km from Trujillo Alto, on Facebook.
Lt. José Padín, murder director at the criminal investigation unit in nearby Carolina, told the San Juan Daily Star that Damián “had no identification, and that there were no family members who could identify him in advance.” His mother and stepfather were eventually able to identify his body, but according to the Star, he used his birth name. “His mother told me that he always preferred that others call him Samuel, Sam or Sammy when he was on the street,” Padín said.
No motive or suspects were released.
According to the Transgender Law Center, Damián is the seventh known transgender person to die in Puerto Rico since February.
Pedro Julio Serrano, founder of the LGBTQ advocacy group Puerto Rico Para Todas, said police were not doing enough to address the “wave of homophobic and transphobic violence that haunts us like never before.”
“The police do not adhere to their protocols and ignore, make invisible and minimize the serious problem,” Serrano wrote in a statement on his website on Monday, calling on authorities to ‘put an end to the murder’ of Damián. investigation.
Puerto Rico’s hate crime law contains both sexual orientation and gender identity, but according to Metro Weekly, local prosecutors rarely apply it.
After the charred remains of two trans women were found last spring in a burnt-out car on Humacao, the FBI stepped in to join the investigation. In April, the suspects, Juan Carlos Pagán Bonilla (21) and Sean Díaz de León (19), became the first people in Puerto Rico to face charges of federal hate crime.
The victims – Layla Peláez (21) and Serena Angelique Velázquez (32) – were found a few days after another transgender woman, Penélope Díaz Ramírez (31), was beaten and hanged in a men’s prison in Bayamon.
In February, Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, also known as Alexa, was shot dead one day in Toa Alta after being reported to police for using the women’s bathroom in a McDonald’s. Ruiz’s attackers allegedly posted video of the shooting on social media.
The following month, Yampi Méndez Arocho, a 19-year-old transgender man, was killed in Moca after being shot twice in the face and twice in the back. Méndez was reportedly assaulted by a woman a few hours before the shooting.
The body of nursing school student Michelle Michellyn Ramos Vargas was found in late September near a farm in San German in the southwest. Vargas was repeatedly shot in the head and left on an isolated road.
In 2020, according to the Human Rights Campaign, at least 44 transgender and gender-enhancing people were killed in the United States, making it the deadliest year since the organization began tracking such deaths in 2013.
Damián is already the second known trans person to die by violence this year after the death of 28-year-old Tyianna Alexander, who was shot dead on January 6 in Chicago.
The Transgender Law Center mourns Damian’s death in a tweet Wednesday writes: ‘We are appalled at what you experienced in your last moments. Trans men deserve dignity and the chance to thrive. ”
In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Damián posted on Facebook about his excitement for the ‘coming new year’.
‘[I’m] grateful for all the experiences that taught me how strong we really are, ”he wrote. “To life, to good and evil, and to all righteousness that comes forth.”
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