Police were
called early that morning to an apartment building in Highland Park, a suburb
of Detroit, The Detroit News reports. They found Skinner in
a hallway with a fatal gunshot wound to her neck.
Wayne County
prosecutors told the News that Skinner and her boyfriend,
Michael Cortez Norris, 26, had engaged in an argument that ended with the
shooting. They said Norris dragged her body from an apartment into the hallway
and fled the scene.
Police
eventually tracked Norris down and arrested him. He is charged with
second-degree murder, tampering with evidence, and a felony-level firearm
violation.
Skinner is at
least the fourth trans American to have died by violence in 2022. Her death
reflects the high level of intimate partner violence faced by trans people,
advocates said.
“There has
been a spike in domestic violence calls,” Julisa Abad, a victim advocate for
the Wayne County prosecutor’s office, told Detroit TV station WJBK. “A lot of people don't seek help for a number of
reasons.”
In a Human
Rights Campaign press release, Abad added, “Trans women of color
experience higher rates of all violence. It’s so important to know about
lifesaving resources in your area … as a community we need to do better at
protecting and being vigilant for our sisters.”
“At the age of
25, Naomie had her entire life ahead of her,” Tori Cooper, HRC’s director of
community engagement for its Transgender Justice Initiative, said in the
release. “Her death is a reminder of the epidemic of violence against Black
transgender women. Without action, this epidemic will continue to claim the
lives of transgender and gender-nonconforming people when their lives are just
starting out. Naomie’s life mattered and we must continue the fight to protect
the lives of not just members of the trans and LGBTQ+ community, but all of
us.”
The 2015 U.S.
Transgender Survey found that 54 percent of transgender and nonbinary people
have experienced some form of intimate partner violence in their life. This
population is also deeply affected by gun violence; research on homicides of
trans people from 2017 to 2019 found that three-fourths of them involve a gun,
and the proportion is even greater, nearly 80 percent, for Black trans women.
Shycuria
Harris, Skinner’s sister, has set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for funeral expenses. She
wants to give Skinner’s loved ones “a chance to celebrate her fabulous life,”
she wrote.
SOURCE: ADVOCATE
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