It can be hard being openly transgender or intersex, but it’s also harder when you’re even a person of color. According to a 2011 study, Latinx trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people face the highest level of discrimination compared to other racial and ethnic groups, and that hasn’t changed in over a decade. This past year alone, three trans people were killed in Mexico within the first two months of January, two of whom were notable activists, and next November marked the alleged murder of the country’s earliest nonbinary individual, Jesús Ociel Baena Saucedo. Most recently, the Renton Police Department in Washington confirmed on their Instagram section that Reyna Hernandez, a 54-year-old Latina trans woman and salon owner from Renton, was found deceased in a cemetery in northeastern Mexico on March 8 after she was reported missing on February 26. According to officials, she had reportedly been tortured and murdered as she had a gunshot wound, her hands and feet were bound, and her body was covered by a cover. Authorities now have a suspect from Renton in prison, who Hernandez’s community says is her lover of thirty years and was arrested in Mexico on related charges, ABC News reported.
“This is the worst possible outcome, and our hearts go out to Reyna’s family and friends,” said Investigations Commander Chandler Swain in a news release according to the Facebook post. “We are working closely with Mexicali officers and our U.S. Federal colleagues to determine when and where Reyna was killed.”
Before her reported crime, Hernandez was described as “outgoing and lively” by friends and family, according to the Advocate. Though she’d apparently been in a relationship with her 61-year-old partner for decades, her sister, Sara Carillo, told news station KCPQ that clients shared that she’d shown up to work with a dark eye ahead of her disappearance. Carillo described her as a thinker, a hard and forceful woman with a lot of love to give.
Hernandez went missing on February 26 after she told a friend she was running an errand at her house. But by February 28, she still hadn’t opened her shop, gone to work, or responded to texts and calls, and no one could find her car. She was found weeks later after Renton officers found an article from a nearby Mexican news reporting the discovery of an unidentified person’s body in a tomb in Mexicali close to the U.S.-Mexico border. Currently, authorities are investigating her death as a domestic violence case and are hoping to convict the suspect on kidnapping charges. They are also trying to determine if the murder took place in the U.S. or Mexico.
“Reyna’s brutal murder sheds light on the pervasive danger faced by trans individuals, particularly trans women of color. These incidents underscore the urgent need to address how institutional violence translates into interpersonal violence against our community,” the TransLatin@ Coalition, an advocacy organization for the Latinx immigrant trans community, said in a statement about the case.
The investigation is currently ongoing.
