This article mentions fatal violence against a Black transgender woman.
Shannon Boswell, a Black transgender woman who was about to turn 31 years old, was killed last week in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
Initial local media reports of Boswell’s death misgendered her until her mother, Tammy Boswell, identified her to local outlet WSB-TV 2 as a trans woman. Authorities initially believed that Boswell died in a crash involving a hit-and-run driver on Tuesday, July 2. However, following an autopsy the next day, the medical examiner’s office discovered evidence that she had also been shot, though WAGA also said that it was unclear whether the shooting or the crash was the official cause of death. Authorities have yet to identify a suspect.
According to WAGA (which also misgendered Boswell), the DeKalb County Police were notified of a crash at an intersection in Stone Mountain, Georgia on Tuesday evening. Police said that the victim had been hit just after 11 p.m., and when they arrived at the scene Boswell was already dead on the road, with the driver nowhere to be found.
A resident of the area who wished to remain anonymous spoke with WSB-TV 2 and said that she had heard “a gunshot and then a few seconds later, it sounded like a car crash or like someone going over the median or something like that.”
“It was very fast, very like, what’s just going on,” the anonymous neighbor told the station.
Tammy Boswell told WSB-TV 2 that on Tuesday evening, she started receiving calls from Shannon’s friends, including her daughter’s boyfriend, reporting that she had been shot. When Tammy tried to reach the DeKalb County police, they told her that there were no reports of anyone being shot. The police did not realize that Boswell had been shot until the following day, when the autopsy results came back.
The Human Rights Campaign, which tracks fatal violence against trans people in the U.S., has yet to update its count, but per the organization’s tracking Boswell is at least the 19th trans American who has been killed in 2024. Seventy-three percent of victims have been people of color, and 33% were Black trans women.
“They killed my baby,” Tammy told WSB-TV, adding that Shannon was “shot and then left in the street like a deer.” “Shannon was really a very sweet person...and ain’t nobody have a right to take [her] from me.”
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