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The boyfriend of a California transgender woman has been charged with her murder after prosecutors said police found him with blood on his hands after he called 911.
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On Tuesday afternoon, Elijah Cruz Segura pleaded not guilty to murder with a weapon enhancement in the death of Natalia Smüt, a 24-year-old drag artist and entertainer also known as Natalia Smüt Lopez, in San Jose, California. She’s at least the 16th trans or gender non-conforming person to have been killed this year.
Early Friday morning, Segura called police to a home in Milpitas, California, according to a police release. Police found Smüt lying on the ground with “significant injuries” and took Segura into custody after he said he was responsible. Smüt later died at the hospital.
This year is on track to be the deadliest on record for trans and gender non-conforming people, according to a tally the Human Rights Campaign. By the end of April 2020—which was previously the most lethal year on record—the group had tracked 10 violent deaths of such individuals.
Most of those killed this year, like last year, are Black and Latinx trans women; Smüt was Afro-Rican. A blog post by Project More, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, said Smüt was “known best for her motivating and creative spirit, captivating performances, and her love for advocacy within the community.”
“She would step into a room like a firework. Everywhere she went, she brought energy, fierce looks, and a personality that shined bright like a diamond,” according to a GoFundMe set up in Smüt’s name, which has raised more than $10,000 for Smüt’s sister Vanessa Singh. “Her beautiful soul and presence is no longer here on earth with us anymore, but she is forever in our hearts.”
Smüt’s death sparked mass mourning over the weekend in San Jose, where more than 100 people gathered at City Hall to set up a memorial of flowers and candles, grieve her death, and celebrate her life. One close friend told the Mercury News that Smüt had loved to perform ever since she was a child, sometimes to singers like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears.
“We lost a jewel in our community,” Project More President Nathan Svoboda told the outlet.
Smüt wasn’t even the first trans woman to be killed last week. Tiara Banks, a 24-year-old Black trans woman, was shot to death in Chicago on April 21, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Prosecutors in Santa Clara County, California, have not given a motive for Segura’s alleged actions but suggested that they view Smüt’s death as a case of domestic violence.
Research indicates that trans individuals experience higher rates of intimate partner violence than cis people. Trans people are 2.2 times more likely than cis people to experience physical intimate partner violence and 2.5 times more likely to deal with sexual intimate partner violence, according to a 2020 analysis published in the American Journal of Public Health.
Advocates have also warned that the measures needed to fight the coronavirus—namely, keeping people in their house all day—would likely lead the frequency and severity of domestic violence to spike. Police departments across the country said last year that they’d already started to see an increase in reports of domestic violence.
Last year, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, of the National Center for Transgender Equality, which also tracks the deaths of trans people, told VICE News that many of the trans women killed in 2020 had a relationship with their alleged killer.
“This is often not stranger violence, just, ‘Oh, I realized you were trans and I’m going to murder you,’” Heng-Lehtinen said. “There are multiple, multiple women who were killed by boyfriends or men who they were seeing, who knew that she was transgender—but then they freaked out about their friends, or other people around them, finding out that she was transgender, and so they murdered her. That happened to more than one transgender woman. And these are people who claim to love them.”
This epidemic of violence against trans people has also taken place as more than 31 states have introduced bills that would block trans athletes from participating in sports that match their gender identity. At least 20 states have introduced bills to block trans children from accessing gender-affirming health care.
