Puerto Rican police are investigating the death of a transgender man found with multiple gunshot wounds on 9 January.
A driver was driving on an unlighted stretch of highway in Trujillo Alto, a municipality about 15 miles southeast of San Juan, when he hit something, according to the local news site WAPA. As he got out of the car, he realized it was a corpse and notified the authorities, who identified the victim as Samuel Edmund Damián Valentín.
Police initially misinterpreted Damián, who listed his current home as Juncos on Facebook, less than 15 miles from Trujillo Alto.
Lieutenant José Padín, homicide director for the criminal investigation unit in neighboring Carolina, told the San Juan Daily Star that Damián “had no identification and there were no family members who could identify him previously”. Her mother and stepfather managed to identify her body, but used her birth name, according to Star. “His mother told me that he always preferred that others call him Samuel, Sam or Sammy when he was on the street,” said Padín.
No reason or suspect was announced.
Damián is the seventh transgender known to die from violence in Puerto Rico since last February, according to the Transgender Law Center.
Pedro Julio Serrano, founder of the LGBTQ advocacy group Puerto Rico Para Todas, said the police are not doing enough to deal with “the wave of homophobic and transphobic violence that haunts us like never before”.
“The police do not follow their protocols and ignore, make invisible and minimize the serious problem,” wrote Serrano on Monday in a statement on his website asking authorities to “investigate the angle of hatred in the murder” of Damián.
Puerto Rico’s hate crime law includes sexual orientation and gender identity, but according to Metro Weekly, local prosecutors rarely apply them.
After the charred remains of two trans women were found inside a car burned down in Humacao last spring, the FBI stepped in to join the investigation. In April, the suspects, Juan Carlos Pagán Bonilla, 21, and Sean Díaz de León, 19, were the first people in Puerto Rico to face federal hate crime charges.
The victims – Layla Peláez, 21, and Serena Angelique Velázquez, 32 – were found just days after another transgender woman, Penélope Díaz Ramírez, 31, was beaten and hanged in a male prison in Bayamon.
In February, Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, also known as Alexa, was shot dead in Toa Alta one day after being reported to the police for using the McDonald’s women’s bathroom. Ruiz’s attackers posted a video of the shooting on social media.
The following month, Yampi Méndez Arocho, a 19-year-old transsexual man, died in Moca after being shot twice in the face and two in the back. Méndez was reportedly assaulted by a woman a few hours before the shooting.
The body of nursing student Michelle Michellyn Ramos Vargas was found in late September near a farm in San German, in the southwest. Vargas had been shot several times in the head and left on an isolated road.
In 2020, at least 44 transgender and gender non-conformists were killed in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign, making it the most lethal year since the organization began tracking these deaths in 2013.
Damián is already the second trans person known to die of violence this year, after the death of Tyianna Alexander, 28, shot to death in Chicago on January 6.
The Transgender Law Center mourned Damian’s death in a tweet Wednesday, writing: “We are horrified by what you experienced in your last moments. Trans men deserve dignity and a chance to prosper. “
In the early hours of the morning of New Year’s Day, Damián posted on Facebook about his excitement about the “new year that is coming”.
“[I’m] grateful for all the experiences that taught me how strong we really are, ”he wrote. “For life, for good and for evil, and for all justice to come.”
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