Remembering Our Dead

TDoR 2020 / 2020 / April / 01 / Ashley Moore

Ashley Moore

Age 26

1 Apr 2020
Newark, New Jersey (USA)
Not reported

Ashley was found dead with unexplained and serious injuries outside Newark YMCA on Wednesday 1st April but her body was cremated without an autopsy.

Four months later, police finally started to investigate her death.

Police are finally investigating the death of a Black trans woman who was found dead in the street more than four months ago with horrifying injuries and cremated without an autopsy.

Chef Ashley Moore was just 26 years old when she was found dead outside the YMCA in Newark, New Jersey, just after 4 am on April 1.

Her mother, nurse Starlet Carbin, was never notified by police that her daughter had passed away. Instead, she had to find out via Facebook when she visited her daughter’s profile to wish her a happy birthday, nine days after she had died.

Interviewed by activist Jasmin Singer, Carbin said: “All the information I obtained I got on my own. No one contacted me to let me know my child was dead.”

When Carbin contacted authorities, she was first told by a Newark police detective that a doctor at the hospital Moore was transported to before she was pronounced dead said she had likely been hit by a car. Later, the same detective suggested she could have fallen from a great height.

Carbin said the police report, which she was allowed to finally access at the end of July, noted that there were ligature marks on Moore’s legs, she had suffered rectal bleeding and her neck was “grossly swollen and disfigured”.

As a trained nurse, Carbin said: “Going into what I know when I’m looking at a patient, the description that’s in that police report is not of someone who fell or was hit by a vehicle.”

The police report also states that a witness saw Moore running down, not up, the stairs of the YMCA before she was found outside.

Ashley Moore, 26. She should be here.

Say her name. Do not tolerate the invisibility of Black women’s names and stories. #BlackTransLivesMatter https://t.co/3hjHxhgQAV pic.twitter.com/CKL0aRi3eu
— Shanice Brittany Clarke?????? (@shaniceoregon) August 8, 2020