TDoR list ref: tgeu/24-Mar-2020/Naomi Nicole "La Soñaré" Naomi Nicole García ("La Soñaré") [photo: www.facebook.com]
Naomi was shot by two off-duty soldiers. Both were apprehended after attempting to flee the scene in a car.
Mexico City.- A [trans woman] was executed with at least one bullet to the head, at calle Estrella casi equina and Eje 1 Poniente Guerrero in the Guerrero neighborhood, Cuauhtémoc mayor's office. The murderers fled, hitting Paseo de la Reforma, in the roundabout of La Palma in a wine-colored Astra car, where they were detained.
Around 04:30 in the morning on Monday, two armed subjects discussed with a [trans woman], approximately 25 years old, who they then shot in the head before fleeing towards the Paseo de la Reform.
After hearing the gunshots, local residents came out to see what was happening. When they found the a woman lying on the sidewalk they called the 911 emergency number and requested an ambulance to attend to the victim, who was bleeding from the head.
The two killers were arrested after losing control of their vehicle.
Thanks to surveillance footage, it was possible to identify the agents who were driving a Chevrolet Astra in which they tried to flee. When the driver lost control of the vehicle and crashed in the La Palma roundabout, officers arrested Aristotle Alan, an infantry soldier, and second lieutenant José Luis, both active members of the Sedena.
Both were detained with a weapon loaded with seven 9 mm cartridges and were taken to the CUH-2 ministerial agency.
The circumstances of Naomi's murder illustrate not only how precarious the lives of many trans people are in Latin America, but how many of them are being forced to continue sex work on the street in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic:
“She was looking for her family to love her. To accept her for what she is, ”says Scarlett Vargas Gutiérrez, a trans woman, also a sex worker, who shared a room with the deceased in a downtown hotel between March and September 2019.
Health authorities have been asking people to stay home for weeks because of the pandemic. But there they were, at 4 in the morning, two soldiers and a sex worker.
Scarlett says that the girls live daily, that if they do not go out on the street they do not eat and that in that perspective there is no possible choice.
Naomi was reportedly quite a character. One of her friends said this about her:
“Although she seemed haughty at first, Naomi had a huge heart. She was very loud, with a lot of personality. All of it a chaos! I would die of laughter as soon as I heard her talk about herself with her village accent that caught our attention so much... And always with her eyes painted very black, ”Rosy remembers her. She still keeps some shoes that Naomi had bought. “They were too small for him; she wore size six, I wore four, so she gave them to me. I never put them on, but here I have them like a treasure!”
