This story mentions acts of violence against transgender people.
The bodies of two transgender women were found in a badly burned car in Puerto Rico on Wednesday, The New York Times reports. Their deaths are considered to be the seventh and eighth known violent deaths against transgender or gender non-conforming (TGNC) people in the U.S. this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Activists say that the incident is part of an ongoing wave of anti-LGBTQ+ violence on the island. Pedro Julio Serrano, a leading gay rights activist in Puerto Rico, said that four transgender people had been killed there in the last two months. “This is an epidemic of violence, anti-LGBT violence that has resurfaced in Puerto Rico,” he told the Times. “We haven’t seen this type of violence in this quantity in a very long time — I would say 10 years.”
The victims were identified by Serrano and other activists as Layla Peláez, 21, and Serena Angelique Velázquez, 32. The women were friends who both lived in New York City, having recently visited Puerto Rico on vacation. They were planning to fly back to New York later this month, according to family members and activists.
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The women’s bodies were found after a 911 call reported a burned car on a road in Humacao, just before 5 a.m. on Wednesday, Capt. Teddy Morales, the chief of criminal investigations for the Puerto Rico police in Humacao, told the Times. The police determined that the killings were homicides, but said that they were waiting for autopsy results to determine the cause of death.
Captain Morales also added that he is not yet able to confirm the killings were a hate crime, because the investigation is still in its early stages. “I can’t just say this is a hate crime from the scene,” he told the Times.
Luz Melendez, Peláez’s cousin, said that Peláez’s grandmother recognized her granddaughter’s badly burned car on the news Wednesday and called the police. “In reality, we never thought something like this would happen,” Melendez told the Times. “She didn’t have bad friends and she was never in the street. It caught us by surprise since she transitioned so easily and she didn’t ever have any issues.”
Peláez and Velázquez were the latest of several other transgender people who have recently been slain in Puerto Rico. In February, a transgender woman named Alexa Negrón Luciano was shot to death and later memorialized by Puerto Rican music star Bad Bunny on late night TV. Last month, Yampi Méndez Arocho, a 19-year-old transgender man, was killed in Moca, P.R., according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Their deaths are indicative of a larger global crisis of targeted violence against TGNC individuals. Last fall, the Trans Murder Monitoring Project (TMMP) reported that a total of 331 TGNC people around the world were reported killed between October 1, 2018 and September 30, 2019. That figure is also likely to be underreported due to unreliable data collection and the fact that individuals may not be properly identified as TGNC. Most of the reported deaths of trans people in the U.S. disproportionately affected Black trans women and other women of color.
“We are asking the police to thoroughly, immediately, and transparently investigate these vile and atrocious murders,” Ivana Fred, an LGBTQ+ activist in Puerto Rico, told the Times. “Trans people deserve to live in peace, with equity and freedom.”
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