Maryland police say transgender woman's killing was 'not random'
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Version 0 of 1. A transgender woman was killed in a Washington DC suburb on Thursday night, in an attack officials said was “not random”. Related: Two LGBT murders within 24 hours leaves community in 'state of emergency' Zella Ziona, 21, was shot in the head behind a laundromat in Gaithersburg, Maryland, at around 5.50pm. According to figures compiled by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), she was the 22nd transgender or gender-nonconforming person reportedly killed in a homicide in the US this year. Police arrested Rico Leblond on Thursday and the 20-year-old has been charged with first-degree murder. “It’s not random … investigators are looking at many things,” Montgomery County police captain Paul Starks told the Guardian. On Friday, police chief J Thomas Manger said in a statement: “This is a horrific crime and a tragedy for those who knew Zella. As with all homicides in Montgomery County, we have detectives working around the clock to thoroughly and completely investigate this murder.” For almost 24 hours after her death, however, Ziona was misgendered and misidentified by police and local media. “We got a call for a shooting that just occurred involving a female victim at about 5.45pm or 5.49pm yesterday evening,” Starks told the Guardian on Thursday. “When first responders get there, by all impressions and appearances … it was a female victim with an apparent gunshot wound.” When Zella’s body was transported to a local hospital police received a call telling them to change her gender marker. “The message was [that] during medical treatment we’ve determined that she’s a male,” Starks said. According to Starks, police immediately changed all releases and media alerts to use “male” as an identifying term, even though all officials at the scene had identified Zella as female. “A person’s background isn’t our concern,” he said. “If somebody calls the police we are coming there to do our job and our job was to protect that person.” Yet transgender and gender-nonconforming people still are often misidentified. In August, the death of Jasmine Collins, a transgender woman from Kansas City, Missouri, went unnoticed by friends and the wider LGBT community for months, due to inaccuracies in police and media reporting. “It is not only disrespectful and insensitive for police and media to mis-gender transgender victims like Zella Ziona – it is completely inaccurate,” said Chai Jindasurat, co-director of community organizing and public advocacy at the New York City Anti-Violence Project. “This kind of misinformation contributes to a culture of violence against transgender people and leads to the under-reporting of violence and homicide affecting transgender and gender nonconforming people in this country.” |