The weather in Manhattan on January 30 was bitter, frigid — not the kind of day you go out into if you don’t have to, least of all to a windswept plaza in the shadow of the bunker-like headquarters of the New York City Police Department. But that afternoon, a bundled-up crowd of more than 100 people, about half of them transgender women of color, massed there for more than an hour, holding signs that read "Transgender Lives Matter And Justice For Islan Nettles". In the crowd was Janet Mock, a former People magazine editor who was about to publish her memoir, Redefining Realness, about her life as a transgender woman. She was with Melissa Sklarz and Madison St. Claire, the trans women who were advocating for trans rights in New York City years before boldfaced names like Chaz Bono, Chelsea Manning, and Laverne Cox helped thrust the issue into the spotlight.
Suddenly, a woman in outrageous red cat’s-eye sunglasses, a cobalt coat, pink scarf, and black tights came stalking toward the crowd, shouting, “Trans lives matter!” It was a local transgender actress Daisy Lopez. Her peers began whooping. Lopez looked at the wall of NYPD cops there to patrol the rally in their dark blue uniforms, expressions impassive. “You fucking saw it!” she screamed at them. “Everybody saw it! Do your jobs!”
“Do your jobs!” the crowd started chanting. Despite the freezing cold, the rally was on.
Its ostensible purpose was to demand a full account and update from the NYPD and the office of New York County District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. on the investigation into the death of Islan Nettles [pronounced élan], a pretty, young, transgender woman from Harlem. Shortly after midnight on August 17, 2013, Nettles, finally in possession of her own apartment after periods of homelessness and newly embarked on a career in design, was walking with friends in Harlem when what apparently began as flirting with a group of young men took a bad turn as the men realized the women were transgender.
According to several accounts, one young man struck Nettles to the ground and beat her unconscious. Some accounts say that police, summoned from a nearby station by Nettles’s friends, had to pull the young man off of her. Nettles was taken to Harlem Hospital in an ambulance and declared brain-dead four days later.
A young man, 20-year-old Paris Wilson, was immediately arrested for the attack and released on $2,000 bail. The crime was initially classified as assault, a misdemeanor. That charge was dropped in November, even as authorities said they were still investigating the beating as a possible homicide and hate crime.
Since then, there have been few announcements from authorities on the case, although in private visits, they have told trans activists they are aggressively pursuing it. In an off-the-record call, a DA’s office staffer told me that much of the community’s story about the attack and the police’s mishandling of the case is inaccurate. For example, the staffer said, it appeared that the attacker had not beaten Nettles repeatedly but had struck her once, hard enough for her to fall down and incur a concussion on the sidewalk.
The staffer also told me that the DA’s office was pursuing the case every day, but that bringing someone to trial depended largely upon certain witnesses — with whom the DA has met — being willing to surrender more information.
But that Thursday in late January, trans activists and their cisgender (where one’s experience of gender aligns with their born sex) allies from groups such as ACT UP were out to demand that investigators bring them up to date. Passing around a large red megaphone, they shouted questions at the cops: Why did it appear they had not taken a DNA sample from Wilson at the scene of crime, though they reportedly had to pull him off of Nettles? (The DA staffer told me that there was no blood on Wilson’s knuckles.) Why weren’t all witnesses detained and questioned? Why was there no police follow-up on Nettles while she was in the hospital? Why had no footage of the crime surfaced, even though it had occurred across from a police station covered in security cameras?
“Why didn’t a detective come to the hospital?” demanded Delores Nettles, Islan’s mother, through the megaphone. “A social worker there had to call the DA’s office. I said to them, ‘Half of my child’s brain is hanging out of her head and you can’t tell me anything?’ ”
Yet, at the rally, beneath the demand for answers about Islan Nettles, was a deeper anger. As Mock put it to me when the rally was breaking up, “[The death of ] Islan isn’t the first death of a transgender woman of color, and she’s not going to be the last. I’m at risk every day myself just walking the streets of New York City. We all are.”