Brutally attacked in South Shore, Black trans woman questions lagging police investigation

‘If this was a white woman, and a Black man had stabbed her up, I think they would’ve found that person,’ Arhmani Washington says. Police suspended their investigation after 1 day.

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Arhmani Washington, 25, near her Chicago Lawn apartment.

Arhmani Washington, 25, near her Chicago Lawn apartment.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times

Arhmani Washington says she has been smacked with guns and robbed.

Washington, who describes herself as an escort, knows her line of work puts her in that kind of danger. But she was never truly frightened until being attacked in her former South Shore home.

“Until I had someone break in to my house and stab me, that really scared me. I’ve never been more scared in my life.” says Washington, 25, who thinks she was targeted because she’s transgender.

Washington questions whether, because she’s trans and Black, the Chicago Police Department put little effort into finding her attacker.

The police haven’t made an arrest. They say detectives suspended their investigation one day after the April 7 attack and are still awaiting the results of testing of forensic evidence sent to a state lab.

“When I told them I was trans,” Washington says of the police, “they stopped calling.

“If this was a white woman, and a Black man had stabbed her up, I think they would’ve found that person.”

She says she recognized her attacker as someone she met months earlier, turned him away because he didn’t offer payment and thinks the attack was retribution.

Arhmani Washington, 25, received stitches for several stab wounds in an April attack at her home.

Arhmani Washington, 25, received stitches for several stab wounds in an April attack at her home.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times

The night of the attack, a man slipped through an open window in to Washington’s apartment in South Shore, according to the police.

He said, “B----, I’m finally here,” according to Washington, who says she recognized his eyes.

She says he sliced her arm and forehead and kicked and slashed her abdomen so badly it caused some of her intestines to spill out.

Her roommate rushed from the bathroom on hearing the commotion, disarmed the man, then dragged him out of the apartment, police say. Washington was hospitalized for a week.

Violence against women because they are transgender is a national problem. So far in 2020, at least 22 transgender people nationwide have died by violence, according to the Human Rights Campaign, which tracks fatal attacks against transgender people.

In Chicago, three trans women have been killed in the past two years:

  • Selena Reyes-Hernandez was shot and killed May 31 by a high school student in Marquette Park after he learned she was transgender, authorities say. Charged in the murder was 18-year-old Orlando Perez, who the police say told detectives he was so upset that he returned later that day to shoot her lifeless body again.
  • Ciara Frazier, a 31-year-old trans woman, was fatally stabbed in October 2018 by a man in an abandoned building in West Garfield Park. No one’s been charged.
Ciara Minaj Frazier.

Ciara Minaj Frazier.

Provided

  • Dejanay Stanton, a sex worker, was taken to a secluded area in Bronzeville in August 2018 and shot dead, according to prosecutors, by Tremon Hill, then 17, who they say acted after realizing Stanton was a transgender woman.
Dejanay Stanton.

Dejanay Stanton.

Facebook

“A lot of guys are, like, ‘How can you dress like that?’ ” Washington says. “A lot of guys can’t face the fact that they’re attracted to a trans woman.”

The charges filed in Stanton’s killing were the first in the killing of a transgender person in Chicago since at least 2016, according to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. The charges in Reyes-Hernandez’s death were the second.

Anti-trans violence falls overwhelming on transgender women of color, who account for about 80% of the killings of trans people, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington advocacy group that says some attacks involve clear anti-transgender bias and that, in others, being transgender puts victims at risk in other ways, such as forcing them into poverty, homelessness or survival sex work.

“We’re taught to be afraid of what we don’t know,” says LaSaia Wade, executive director of the Black- and trans-led Chicago advocacy group Brave Space Alliance, who says she has raised $6,000 for Washington’s recovery. “We’re not taught to love ourselves the way we are, and that brings a level of violence.”

In Chicago, the police have kept statistics on gender-motivated hate crimes since 2012 but have been recording hate crimes against transgender people since only 2016. Since then, they have labeled 16 crimes as a hate crime against a transgender person.

But they haven’t counted anti-transgender crimes such as the killings of Stanton and Frazier and the attack against Washington in that statistic.

Just three arrests have been made in the 16 recorded hate crimes: the murder charge in Reyes-Hernandez’s killing and misdemeanor charged in two assaults. So far, none of those has resulted in a conviction, according to court records.

The limited reporting of hate crimes might be due to factors including the trans community’s strained relationship with the police and inadequate training of officers to report hate crimes, according to Brian Levin, head of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Nationally, anti-trans hate crimes are on the rise, though that could be due to improved reporting, according to Levin, who says it’s also a sign that authorities are taking those crimes more seriously.

The trans community is vulnerable, facing stereotypes and a lack of acceptance and basic dignity in the eyes of many people, says Levin, who points to President Donald Trump’s tweet targeting transgender members of the military.

Arhmani Washington, 25, and a kitten she rescued and named “Harry Potter” at her apartment in Chicago Lawn on the Southwest Side.

Arhmani Washington, 25, and a kitten she rescued and named “Harry Potter” at her apartment in Chicago Lawn on the Southwest Side.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times

Washington says she was born in Wisconsin and was in and out of a series of foster homes before settling in Chicago in high school.

She says she began working as an escort, which had her traveling from state to state, until she found work as a social worker at Chicago House and Social Services, a job she held for three years.

Washington says she has gone back to her old life to make a living since moving out of South Shore after the attack.

Police spokesman Luis Agostini says reforms being implemented under the city’s federal consent decree will give officers “the clear policy, training and direction needed to provide equal protection of the law for all Chicago residents. This includes revising our policies guiding interactions with transgender, intersex and gender nonconforming individuals.

“Chicago police officers strive to treat everyone with dignity and respect and without bias or reference to any stereotypes based on race, color, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or any other demographic factor,” Agostini says.

Washington says it’s pathetic how she was treated by the police.

“Society makes it seem like trans women are evil people — like they’re sex objects. Look at me. I did good for three years [as a social worker], and then look at where I’m at now. People act like we don’t have the same blood color in our system. And the thing is people don’t know I’m trans until I tell them.”

She says she feels fortunate, though, to have survived her attack and to be able now to get the word out.

“Girls like me,” she says, “usually don’t live to tell their story.”

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