Deoni Jones
Age 232 Feb 2012
Washington, D.C. (USA)
Stabbed
TDoR list ref: tgeu/3-Feb-2012/Deoni Jones
Deoni was attacked by a man at a bus stop and stabbed in the head. She died in hospital.
In August 2017 Gary N. Montgomery, 55, was acquitted of her murder.
A D.C. Superior Court trial began on Wednesday for a District man charged with first-degree murder while armed for the February 2012 stabbing death of transgender woman Deoni JaParker Jones, 23, at a bus stop in Northeast Washington.
Police and prosecutors charged Gary N. Montgomery, who was 55 at the time of the incident, with stabbing Jones in the head as she stood at a bus stop near her home at East Capitol Street and Sycamore Road, N.E. on the evening of Feb. 2, 2012.
The incident shocked members of the LGBT community who organized vigils at the site of the stabbing and called for greater efforts to curtail hatred and bias toward transgender people.
Police identified and arrested Montgomery less than a week after the stabbing based on information provided by witnesses and nearby residents.
The verdict shocked Jones’s family members and LGBT activists, who believed prosecutors and homicide detectives presented a strong case that defendant Gary Montgomery committed the murder. But court observers said the defense raised a number of issues challenging the evidence presented by prosecutors in a trial that began five years after Montgomery was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder while armed.
The issues brought up by the defense apparently succeeded in raising sufficient doubt in the minds of the jurors that prompted them to hand down a not guilty verdict, according to at least one court observer.
TvT project: Washington Blade 04.02.2012; Metro Weekly 11.04.2012
https://www.washingtonblade.com/2017/08/16/not-guilty-deoni-japarker-jones-murder/
https://www.washingtonblade.com/2017/08/04/trial-begins-man-charged-murder-trans-woman/
https://www.glaad.org/blog/dc-and-nation-mourns-loss-deoni-jones
http://homicidewatch.org/victims/deoni-jones/
