No arrests have been made, and there are no suspects identified in the murder of a transgender activist found slain alongside a ditch in rural Amite City, Louisiana.
Police are still unsure if Shakie Peters, 32, was “shot there, or dumped there,” Chief Joe Chaney of the St. Helena Parrish Sheriff’s Office told People. Initially, the transgender woman was identified as a male, which is one of the many challenges people in the LGBTQ community face amid the unprecedented wave of violence growing among the group.
In 2019 alone, there were, at minimum, 26 transgender people killed, based on data obtained by the National Center for Transgender Equality. And now only a couple months past 2020’s half-year mark, there have been 28 homicides of transgender people, but due to the family or police accurately reporting the gender of victims, a full accounting of the number is impossible.
Peters’ friend Nia Faulk, 29, says she was “an inspiration in how she navigated life,” and Peters had long-lived her life as a female and said she was “consistently laughing, consistently joking, the first person to get up and dance.”
Peters was a performance artist and participant in community development and organizing in and around the New Orleans area.
“Shakie was the person who would come to you and be like, ‘How are you? Are you okay?,’” says Faulk. “She would be a person who would be like, ‘Oh, what do you need me to do?’”
“Shakie would provide moments of joy and laughter that sustained us,” she says. “Whenever you’re facing the systemic issues we face as Black people, that triple identity of being a Black, trans woman, it’s easy to just give up or not want to get out of bed, but you never saw Shakie do that.”
“The saddest part of this is that we have a protocol for when our people die,” Faulk told People. “Most people can mourn the dead once they’ve lost someone, but we actually have to fight for our humanity.”
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