Kiki Fantroy is now the 13th known Black trans woman who has lost her life to violence since the beginning of the year in this country.
According to the Miami Herald, Fantroy, 21, was shot and killed last week in the early morning hours of July 31st, near an abandoned home in Southwest Miami-Dade.
Officers said last week that the shooting death was a result of an argument gone wrong, not believing the incident to be a hate crime.
On Monday, officers arrested a 17-year-old suspect in an unrelated case who later reportedly admitted to shooting and killing Fantroy, NBCMiami reports.
According to NBCMiami, Fantroy was on her way back home from a party with a group of people when she was propositioned for sex. Fantroy refused the 17-year-old who then, according to police, started shooting at another person in the group.
The 17-year-old then allegedly chased Fantroy before gunning her down.
According to Local10, the 17-year-old faces charges of second-degree murder and attempted murder.
Fantroy’s mother had long insisted that her daughter was killed because of her identity.
“This feeling is indescribable. The pain. The void. You know that feeling after losing a child and you losing a child for no apparent reason. Because she’s gay,” Rhonda Comer, Fantroy’s mother, told Miami Herald last week. “And my understanding, you know, my understanding was she was killed because of her desire to be a woman.”
“That wasn’t even a reason to kill [her] … [she] has a right to be [herself]. And nobody have that right to take it away,” Comer told NBCMiami earlier this week.
Comer said that her daughter started to transition more than a decade ago, while still in school. In the early days, Fantroy endured a lot of bullying. Still, the young woman had dreams of going to California and become a second RuPaul.
“That was her dream, RuPaul,” Comer said. “She wanted to be another RuPaul. She used to say one day she was going to California.”
LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign expressed its sadness over Fantroy’s killing. The group noted that Fantroy is the 13th known case of deadly violence in the transgender community in 2019.