Article is from 2018. The man charged with her death has now been sentenced with eight years for the second-degree murder charge and two years for the felony firearm charge.
On December 7th, Kelly Stough, a 36-year-old black transgender woman from Detroit, was shot and killed in the city’s Palmer Park neighborhood. On Monday, Albert Weathers, a 46-year-old preacher, was charged in her murder.
The Wayne County prosecutor’s office charged Weathers with the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony and open murder, a designation that allows the prosecutors to decide on a degree of murder or manslaughter as more information about the case becomes available. Prosecutors said they will bring evidence that the fact that Stough was transgender was a factor in her murder.
Stough, who also went by the name Keanna Mattel, was at least the 26th trans person murdered in the United States in 2018, according to a running tally kept by the Human Rights Watch.
“I want people to know that because she was transgender doesn’t mean that she was not loved, that she was not cared for,” Jessica Chantae Stough, Kelly’s mother, told NBC News. “She has a family who cared about her, who loved her and I want them to know that transgender ladies — expressly those of color — they’re just not throwaways; people care about them.”
Stough was an aspiring fashion designer and well-known in Detroit’s ballroom dance scene. She was also an outspoken advocate for her community, speaking out against the violence facing trans people, and especially trans women of color. “The police are unaware with our struggle so they have no sympathy for us,” she told the Guardian in 2015 after the murder of 20-year-old trans woman Amber Monroe in Palmer Park — the same neighborhood where Stough was killed three years later.
There were 29 recorded murders of trans people in 2017, making it the deadliest year on record for trans people in the U.S., and 2018’s numbers show that the threat is not letting up. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) tracks homicides of LGBTQ people, and put out a report last year showing that trans women of color are at greater risk of being killed in hate crimes than any other group, and that the rates of these murders have been steadily rising for the last several years.
“Abuses based on sexual orientation and gender identity cannot be tolerated,” says Laura Palumbo, communications director for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, which partners with the NCAVP. “In 2019 we need more efforts to promote the visibility of transgender individuals in our communities and to strengthen efforts to combat anti-trans violence in order to protect everyone’s dignity and safety.”
“Police need to build trust with the transgender community by effectively investigating hate crimes and by treating transgender individuals with dignity and respect,” she says. “Responsible media coverage can bring visibility to the staggering rates of violence, discrimination and inequity faced by the transgender community.”
A special prosecutor has been assigned to Weathers’ case, from the Fair Michigan Justice Project, which is collaboration between the Prosecutor’s Office and Fair Michigan Foundation, an LGBTQ advocacy organization. Fair Michigan President Dana Nessel said in a press release about Stough’s murder, “This case reflects the excessive brutality that members of Detroit’s transgender community constantly face. We thank the Detroit Police Department for their efforts to investigate the facts of this tragic crime.”
The attorney for Weathers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Most communities on BeeHaw have standards about editorializing headlines; I usually don't change the article title as a matter of habit. HRC is still counting murders in 2023, and the numbers are still troubling.
Using original titles is for the best in general, but the headline you originally posted felt sensationalized and (based on the comments you’ve received ) was misleading. The story you actually seem to be posting is about the sentencing, why not post an article on that instead?
The reason the article is topical is due to the recent sentencing, but the rollingstone article does a much better job of humanizing her and contextualizing her murder.
Honestly, I think most of the concerns about the title and formatting have as much to do with accuracy and clarity as GamerGate has to do with ethics in games journalism. The hostility of some of these comments is totally unwarranted.
I'd report them, but I'd prefer they stay up in case anyone wants a reminder of why BeeHaw is defederating from most of the threadiverse.
That’s quite a take. I will always be against misleading titles, they too easily manipulate people that rely solely on headlines. GamerGate was fundamentally a sexist mob that whipped up easily influenced headline-readers to abuse their targets. Misleading headlines are a loss for everyone and as you can see they have a chance to derail the discussion.
I agree, I reported one last night but it hasn’t been removed yet.
The one negative comment you’re talking about isn’t even a beehaw user, but thank you for showing that you’re not interacting with the community in good faith.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?
source
Acting in good faith would have been to report it instead of allowing the bad comment to sit as a statement. It was your comment section anyway, you had the most to lose.
Quoting me dictionary definitions isn't constructive to positive conversation, and doubling down on calling me malicious and deceptive when that's clearly not the case isn't nice.
It appears you've totally misread my statement to mean something other than what I intended, but this sentence makes me think you're getting closer to understanding what I really meant.