From In These Times: http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/15470/brutal_murder_highlights_systemic_injustice_towards_transgender_women/
By Melissa Gira Grant
Thursday Aug 15, 2013
“We always seemed to really click together, personality-wise,” Aamina Morrison says of Diamond Williams, whom she first met in a Philadelphia LGBT youth group 12 years ago. “Like the issues of oppression we shared or things that came up in her own transition. She didn’t realize those little things she did for me right there helped me see the possibility for who I am today.”
Williams was brutally murdered last month, her body dismembered and thrown in a field. A 43-year-old Philadelphia man named Charles Sargent, who has previously been charged with rape and aggravated assault, confessed to the crime and led the police to Williams’s remains. He will be tried for murder.
Morrison is now co-director of the peer-led Trans-Health Information Project, which, along with other LGBTQ and social justice groups in Philadelphia, is demanding justice for Williams. They believe Williams was targeted because she was transgender and working in the sex trade. Bringing Sargent to trial isn’t enough, they say; they want changes to how police and the media respond to violence against members of the transgender community.
Morrison has her own reason to believe that if Philadelphia police treated transgender victims of violence better, the friend she remembers from her youth group would still be alive. She says that when she saw Sargent’s photograph in the press after his confession, “it immediately took me back to an incident I had with him.”
She was approached by Sargent in the winter of 2003, she tells In These Times. “I was between jobs at the time, and I had to go back to different ends so I could be able to survive.” Sargent offered her a ride home, she says, “and I gave him a price for whatever it was that he was looking for, and he complied. But something seemed a little sketchy.” He insisted that they park in an isolated place. Morrison says that when Sargent asked her to reach across him to the overhead compartment to take her money, “he put a knife to my neck and a gun to my side,” and said he would kill her if she didn’t do “everything he asked.”
Continue reading at: http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/15470/brutal_murder_highlights_systemic_injustice_towards_transgender_women/
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