Trigger warning: violence and death.
On July 26, Tiffany Harris, a Black transgender woman, was stabbed to death in a Bronx apartment building. Law enforcement found the unconscious 32-year-old with stab wounds on the third floor hallway of 2575 Jerome Avenue around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday morning.
Harris was transferred from the apartment building in Fordham Manor to Saint Barnabas hospital where she was pronounced dead 45 minutes later.
“Friends described Harris as one of a kind, funny, cool, a ‘beautiful soul full of life and love.’ She loved shopping, dancing and partying,” Nico Lang wrote on them.
Police are still looking for the suspect, who they believe was in a relationship with Harris. According to the Human Rights Campaign’s report on Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence in the U.S. in 2019, “at least 49 percent of transgender and gender non-conforming people killed as a result of fatal violence in 2019 were killed by an acquaintance, friend, family member or intimate partner.”
On Monday afternoon, another Black trans woman, Queasha Qwee Hardy, was fatally shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The 24-year-old, who was deadnamed in various publications, was found with gunshot wounds and died on the scene.
Hardy had many friends and loved ones who are grieving her death. Her Instagram page is filled with videos of Hardy dancing and promoting her hairstyling brand, So Federal Styles.
Hardy is the third Black trans woman to be killed in Louisiana in July alone. The others were Draya McCarty and Shaki Peters, who were the 20th and 21st trans people to lose their lives in the U.S. this year. The tragic and unjust murders of Harris and Hardy were the most recent recorded fatalities in the epidemic of transphobic violence.
Correction: July 31, 2020
A previous version of this article attributed Princess Janae Place as the organization that identified Harris’ body. Instead, it was Mariah Lopez, the executive director of the trans advocacy group STARR, who identified her.