Muhlaysia Booker

Dallas police investigating similarities between the deaths of Muhlaysia Booker and Brittany White and an attack on a 3rd black trans woman

Tammye Nash | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com

As Muhlaysia Booker’s family was planning her funeral service this week, Dallas police announced that her murder may be connected to two other attacks on Dallas transgender women that left one woman dead and another seriously injured.

Booker — who made national headlines after an April 12 video went viral showing her being beaten into unconsciousness in the parking lot at her apartment complex as a crowd of onlookers laughed and jeered — was found shot to death on an East Dallas street early Saturday morning, May 18.

At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, May 21, Dallas Police Department’s Maj. Vincent Weddington said that while investigators as yet have found no direct connections between them, Booker’s murder shares a number of similarities with an attack in April in which a black transgender woman was stabbed numerous times but survived, and with the October 2018 shooting death of another black trans woman, Brittany White.

(Police reports at the time identified White as 29-year-old Traylon Brown, and a friend told Dallas Voice that while Brown liked to dress in women’s clothing and used the name Brittany White, he identified as a gay man.)

Booker, 23, was at about 6:44 a.m. Saturday, May 18, by officers responding to a shooting call in the 7200 block of Valley Glen Drive, according to the DPD blog, DPDBeat.com. Officers found her “lying face down in a public street,” and Dallas Fire-Rescue pronounced her to be “deceased from homicidal violence.”

Initial reports described her only as a black female; it wasn’t until about 3 p.m. the next day, reports show, that she was identified as Booker.

Edward Thomas, 29, has been indicted by a grand jury on charges of aggravated assault in connection with the April 12 attack on Booker, and prosecutors are still debating whether to add hate crime enhancements to the charges.

Although Thomas had been released on bail after being arrested for the April assault, records show that he was back in custody on bail violations by May 20. Police have given no indication that Thomas is considered a suspect in Booker’s murder.

White was found “deceased inside [her] vehicle from homicidal violence” at about 3:12 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 21 in the parking lot of an apartment complex at 7100 Gayglen Drive. Like Booker, White had been shot to death.

Police did not identify the trans woman injured in the stabbing assault in April. Maj. Weddington also noted that the murder of a fourth Dallas black trans woman, 22-year-old Shade Schuler, remains unsolved. Schuler’s badly decomposed body was found the morning of July 29, 2015, in a field in the 5600 block of Riverside Drive, a few blocks west of Parkland Hospital.

The primary similarity between three latest attacks is that all the victims were black transgender women. Weddington said that two of the three are known to have gotten into someone’s car just prior to their deaths, while the third allowed someone into her car. At least two of the three women are known to have been near the intersection of Spring Avenue and Lagow Street in East Dallas just prior to their deaths.

The woman who survived the stabbing assault described her attacker as a large black man driving a silver-colored vehicle. Police have asked that anyone with information on any of these attacks contact Homicide Detective David Grubbs at 214-671-3675 or via email at david.grubbsjr@dallascityhall.com.

Police also note that Crime Stoppers will pay up to $5,000 for information called into Crime Stoppers that leads to an arrest and indictment for these or any other felony offenses. Call Crime Stoppers at 214-373-TIPS (8477), 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Abounding Prosperity Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to providing services addressing health, social and economic disparities primarily among black LGBT people, had been providing housing and other assistance to Booker since she was attacked in April.

On Thursday, May 23, officials with Abounding Prosperity issued a statement saying that the organization is “moving forward with a strategic action plan to collaborate with city and county officials to address the community issues impacting black transgender women,” and that AP Inc. “stands in solidarity with our district attorney’s office, Dallas Police Department and all partnering law enforcement agencies who are aggressively seeking justice” for Booker.

While applauding the indictment of Edward Thomas in connection with the April 12 attack on Booker, AP Inc. CEO Kirk Myers asked “our community to please come forward if you have any information that will help the Dallas Police Department find the remaining suspects and bring closure to this case.”

Five trans women murdered this year
Booker was the fourth transgender woman murdered in the U.S. so far in 2019, and within about a day of her death, the toll rose to five when police in Philadelphia confirmed that trans woman Michelle Washington — identified by some sources as Michelle Simone — had been killed there early Sunday morning, May 19.

All five trans women murdered this year have been black women, and all five were shot to death. Also murdered this year have been Dana Martin, 31, shot to death Jan. 6 in Montgomery, Ala.; Ashanti Carmon, 27, shot to death March 30 in Prince George’s County, Md.; and Claire Legato, 21, of Cleveland, Ohio, who was shot during an argument on April 15 and died at a Cleveland hospital on May 14.

At least 26 transgender individuals died violently in the U.S. in 2018, and at least 29 were killed in this country in 2017. According to the Human Rights Campaign, the death toll was at least 23 in 2016, and at least 21 in 2015.

Accurate numbers are difficult to determine because transgender victims are often misgendered and dead-named by family and in police and media reports.

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, trans people “face extraordinary levels of physical and sexual violence” in all aspects of their lives, and more than one in four trans people has been the victim of a bias-driven assault. Those rates, NCTE noted, are higher for trans women and trans people of color.
Jayla Wilkerson, founder of Transgender Pride of Dallas, puts much of the blame for violence against trans women on “toxic masculinity.”

She said, “Men with narrow minds, who love their male privilege and hate any challenge to male dominance, cannot fathom why a ‘man’ would ‘choose’ to give up that power and privilege.

“The fact that trans women exist is an affront to their entire world view,” she continued. “It pisses them off, and it scares them. They react, as toxic masculine men do, with violence.”

Trans women of color are more at risk, Wilkerson said, “due to institutional racism and the intersectionality of race, gender and other classifications of marginalization. Trans people of color tend to not have the resources, social capita, and support network that white trans people enjoy almost naturally.”

Wilkerson also suggested that “violent toxic masculinity is more prevalent in certain cultures than others,” pointing to the fact that “Many Hispanic nations, like Brazil, lead the world in incidents of anti-trans or transphobic violence every year.

“Toxic masculinity and violent anti-social behaviors are also more prominent in impoverished areas and among people with limited education and employment opportunities — which is also based on institutional racism and other societal factors,” she said. “People of color are more likely than others to be in those locations and surrounded by violent people. Dismantling the patriarchy, eradicating institutional racism, increasing gender equality and spreading feminism are the only ways to combat the societal problem of violence against transgender women, and especially transgender women of color.”

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Services for Mulaysia
A wake for Muhlaysia Booker will be held from 6-7 p.m. Monday, May 27, at Golden Gate Funeral Home, 4155 S. R. L. Thornton Freeway. Funeral services will take place at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, May 28, at Cathedral of Hope, 5910 Cedar Springs Road. Both the wake and funeral are open to the public.