Investigated 15 Transphobic Killings. Only Three Led to Hate Crimes Convictions. - Insider

Investigated 15 Transphobic Killings. Only Three Led to Hate Crimes Convictions. - Insider
By: Fashion Posted On: November 20, 2022 View: 570

Investigated 15 Transphobic Killings. Only Three Led to Hate Crimes Convictions. - Insider

VANCOUVER, Washington – On a summer afternoon in 2010, a vibrant, self-assured 9-year-old stood with her mom and her big brother in a long line outside the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon.

Most days, the little dreamer and aspiring makeup artist to Nicki Minaj never got hung up on how she was different from her brothers or classmates, but she felt it.

They'd driven in from their home in Vancouver, Washington, a stronghold of far-right ideology just 20 minutes away from this welcoming scene. Back in Vancouver, Nikki just thought of herself as the only boy around who preferred the WWE Divas when her brothers turned on professional wrestling. She knew she was different, but she didn't know why.

But in that line, happily surrounded by a colorful display of fashion statements and gender expressions, that kid didn't feel so alone, her brother Konrad Kuhnhausen told Insider. Moments later, Lady Gaga walked onstage in a black tuxedo.

That day — August 19, 2010 — Nikolas discovered what it meant to be Nikki, Konrad said, and she never looked back.

"There were a bunch of other gay and trans people that we met standing outside in line, and I think that's when Nikki really started to be like, 'Oh, so I'm not the only one in the world like this,'" Konrad told Insider. "'I'm the only one in my family like this, but there are other people [like me] in the world.'"

Photo of Nikki Kuhnhausen
Nikki Kuhnhausen, who was killed at 17.
Courtesy of Konrad Kuhnhausen

Not long after that concert, Nikki told her mom and her brother that she identified as a girl. And amid all the chaos and instability in the Kuhnhausen family growing up, her gender identity was a constant, Konrad said.

Nikki came out publicly in sixth grade and carved out a space for herself at school as a protector to anyone who found themselves bullied. She was popular, often surrounded by friends, and if a mean kid ever hurled a harsh comment at Nikki, Konrad said, she'd respond confidently, "I know I'm beautiful."

It wasn't until 2019, at age 17, when the unseen risks Nikki had lived with most of her short life became painfully visible.

That's when she met up with David Bogdanov, a 25-year-old man who had approached her outside a bar hours earlier.

When Bogdanov learned Nikki was transgender, he grabbed a phone-charging cable and strangled her.

Nikki's body was discovered six months later by a hiker on Larch Mountain.  

A culture of transphobia

As investigators dug into Nikki's case, they uncovered evidence that Bogdanov was filled with hatred toward LGBTQ people. He called trans people "disturbing" and "disgusting" and used a Russian anti-gay slur, though later, in court, he denied being homophobic.

Of 175 trans homicides in the US from 2017 to 2021 that Insider tracked and analyzed, Nikki's was one of just three killings that prosecutors charged as hate crimes. Notably, none of them involved Black victims.

Yet during roughly that same period — from 2017 to 2020 — local law-enforcement agencies around the US reported 10 homicides involving anti-trans bias to the FBI. And Insider obtained evidence that a larger number of homicides, at least 15, were driven by transphobia. 

Bogdanov's vivid bigotry makes him something of an outlier among the defendants in these cases. Most of the other killers — the majority of them young men in their teens or 20s — didn't appear to hate their victims. Instead, they were gripped by fear: fear of what intimacy with a trans woman said about them, or fear of what would happen if that intimacy were discovered. Fear predicated on the idea that desire for trans people is shameful.

The fatal violence often began with a sexual encounter, or several. Sometimes the perpetrator, like Bogdanov, killed the victim when he learned his date's gender identity. Others killed after an interaction left them questioning their own sexuality. Still others killed a sex partner only after they learned that their relationship might be exposed.

Instead of walking away from the encounters, these young men spiraled into a frenzy of violence.

In court, some of their defense lawyers leaned into that same cultural transphobia, latching onto the false narrative that trans women are deceptive — or are themselves the dangerous predators. Some argued that their clients brutally killed only out of fear for their own life.

These transphobic murders — and a recent spike in trans homicides overall — have come amid a wave of scorn directed against trans people. In the five years covered by Insider's database, anti-trans legislation dramatically ramped up — and with it, an explosion of inciting rhetoric from conservative lawmakers and pundits. 

In 2017, several states followed North Carolina's lead and proposed bills that would force trans people to use the restroom that corresponds to their gender assigned at birth. In 2021, Idaho passed a sports ban, barring trans girls from competing on girls sports teams, sparking 18 copycats, and an Arkansas law banned gender-affirming care. Since 2018, The Washington Post found, 19 states have passed at least one anti-trans law.

The public debate around these bills took over cable news, where conservative talking heads deployed derogatory, inaccurate language to stigmatize trans identity.

The weight of this anti-trans bigotry appears to have turned moments of pleasure into explosions of violence.

In Chicago, a 17-year-old named Tremon T. Hill allegedly shot De'janay Stanton, 24, after a monthlong sexual relationship in which hundreds of texts were exchanged. At one point, Hill, who has pleaded not guilty, urged Stanton to delete photos of him from her phone and told her that their relationship was making him suicidal. In Sherwood, Arkansas, an 18-year-old named Trevone Hayse Miller killed Brayla Stone, 17, whom he'd been dating, after she said she was going public with their relationship. Before the killing, Miller, who pleaded guilty to murder, asked a coworker whether "it was gay" to be intimate with a transgender person, according to police records.

Julissa Aba
Julisa Abad, director of transgender outreach for the Fair Michigan Justice Project, which prosecutes violent crimes against the LGBTQ community in the greater Detroit area.
Sylvia Jarrus for Insider

"Men would rather love trans women of color in private and kill us in public than have anybody in the hood know of their association with us," said Julisa Abad, a trans advocate who is the program director at the Fair Michigan Justice Project. "Things are never going to change until we change that social stigma."

"That is why there are many murders within that young age group," she said. "They have to deal with their own self-hate. They are questioning what that means for them in society."

Rayna Momen, a queer criminologist who studies trans homicides, told Insider that a rising culture of transphobia could help explain why people who may not explicitly hate someone for their gender identity might still be quick to turn to violence in a conflict with a trans person. 

"We live in a society in which we are taught to fear, hate, and be repulsed by transgender people," said Momen, who served as a consultant on Insider's database, "which has led to an epidemic of fatal violence."

"When people are knowledgeable about transgender lives," Momen added, "when they understand the limitations of the gender binary and the fact that it is a social construction, when they better understand the extent to which transgender people are impeded from safely inhabiting and navigating the social world, they are much less likely to harbor irrational fears about transgender people and are less likely to incite violence against them."

The 15 transphobic killings identified by Insider are almost certainly an undercount, as a third of the killings in Insider's database remain unsolved. In addition, documents obtained by Insider in many closed cases were too sparse to draw conclusions about motive.

Brooklyn Stevenson, Brayla Stone, and De'janay Stanton
From left to right: Brooklyn Stevenson, Brayla Stone, and De'janay Stanton
Insider database of transgender homicides, 2017 – 2021

For instance, Brooklyn BreYanna Stevenson, 31, a Black trans woman, was killed in Oklahoma City in 2017 by a known white supremacist who pleaded guilty to her murder. But prosecutors didn't say whether her race or gender identity played a role in the killing.

'He kept seeing her face'

In Chicago, Selena Reyes-Hernandez lived two lives, and fiercely protected her privacy. 

By 37, Reyes-Hernandez had lived in a basement apartment downstairs from members of her extended family for 10 years. To them, she was Ramiro: a man who led an intensely private life and had "no known friends." At least one member of the family knew Reyes-Hernandez to dress in women's clothes in private and said no one would come downstairs to visit without checking in first.

Even when, early in the morning of May 31, 2020, an upstairs relative was awoken by loud noises, she simply messaged Reyes-Hernandez and waited for a response.

Eventually, when that relative — whose name was redacted in the police report — didn't receive an answer, they went downstairs and found the apartment door ajar. 

By then, Reyes-Hernandez lay dead, riddled with gunshot wounds.

Selena Reyes-Hernandez smiling in a room
Selena Reyes-Hernandez, who was killed in Chicago at age 37.
Insider database of transgender homicides, 2017 – 2021

police interviewed several members of the family but came up dry on leads. Her nephew told officers that "he would speak to Ramiro and eat dinner with Ramiro daily, but related that Ramiro kept his family life and his private life separate," according to police records. Another relative offered up that Reyes-Hernandez had been having issues with Spanish-speaking gang members on the job, where Reyes-Hernandez was a union steward — a dead end in the case.

For the first week after her death, the police consistently misgendered and misnamed her.

It wasn't until June 6 when four trans women — all of whom had been friends with Reyes-Hernandez for more than a decade — came forward to the police and shed light on her last hours alive.

The friends told the police that the day before she was killed, she got tested for COVID-19 and headed to Boystown, an LGBTQ neighborhood in Chicago, to walk around.

That night, a few of them went to a party. 

On the drive home, at about 5 a.m. the day she was killed, Reyes-Hernandez was in a hurry. Knowing that she sometimes had sex for money with men she met on dating apps, one of the friends assumed she was late for a date.

But Reyes-Hernandez didn't even tell this friend, who also described her as "extremely private," the details of her planned sexual encounters, a secrecy that may have left her especially vulnerable.

Left to rely on still images from surveillance cameras, the police eventually identified Orlando Perez, an 18-year-old high-school student, as the young man they believe met Reyes-Hernandez early that morning.

Perez entered Reyes-Hernandez's apartment at 5:30 a.m. and left about 20 minutes later, according to a police report. Ten minutes later, Perez returned, armed with a handgun, in the same clothes but with his face covered, and shot Reyes-Hernandez six times, the report said.

Prosecutors later said in court that Perez — who entered a not guilty plea and awaits trial on a murder charge — confessed to the killing in a police interview.

They said Perez told investigators he left Reyes-Hernandez's apartment after finding out she was transgender but returned because, an officer recalled, he "kept seeing her face and it kept bothering him and he was mad as hell."

A document describing the night Selena was killed
A Chicago Police Department incident report shows that Reyes-Hernandez's alleged killer "became upset" after being intimate with a trans woman.
Chicago Police Department

Prosecutors said he told the police he shot her in the head and back and then returned to fire more shots as she lay on the floor.

Reyes-Hernandez was misgendered even in death, when her family laid her to rest at Cementerio Municipal Sabana Grande, in Guerrero, Mexico, as Ramiro.

It was always about Nikki

On a crisp late morning in early October, Konrad sits in the 5-acre Esther Short Park near a tree planted in his sister's memory and talks about her childhood. As he speaks, he fidgets with a steel turtle on a chain around his wrist, which holds some of Nikki's ashes.

"Turtles are my favorite," Konrad told Insider, smiling. "Nikki never listened to me, never did anything I ever wanted to do. It was always about what Nikki wanted to do. So when Nikki passed away, I did what I wanted to do for once."

L: Konrad Kuhnhausen; R: A bracelet containing Nikki's ashes
Konrad Kuhnhausen with a turtle locket that holds some of his sister Nikki's ashes.
Kristina Barker for Insider

While many victims in Insider's database had distant relationships with their biological families, Nikki was not one of them.

Konrad, now 27, was only four years older than Nikki, but he saw himself as her protector for as long as he can remember.

Both of their parents struggled with substance-use disorder and were in and out of their lives. When Konrad, the oldest of four, was 10, he awoke one day to find a note from his parents saying they had gone out for cigarettes.

They didn't come back for four months, he said.

"I would wake up, get the kids ready for school, get myself ready for school, cook a little breakfast, eat at school mainly," he said. "And then we'd come home. Rinse. Wash. Repeat." 

After some time, the kids ran out of food at home, Konrad said, and they moved in with the manager of the mobile home park where they lived. After their parents returned, the manager took in their other two siblings.

Their parents eventually divorced, but their struggles with addiction continued. 

Konrad said that from the time he was a kid, his father expected him to follow in his footsteps. "I was raised to deal drugs," he said. "I was raised to be a biker." 

When Nikki was only 12, he recalls, their mother overdosed.

"Nikki did CPR and called 911 and kept my mom alive," Konrad recalled. "So it's not like Nikki was stupid in any way, shape, or form. She was intelligent in anything that she applied herself to."

That included her dream of becoming a makeup artist. 

When she was 15, he said, she created a detailed list of steps she had to take to be hired by Nicki Minaj. It started with applying for a job in makeup for local newscasters in Portland.

from on Vimeo.

Konrad said he and Nikki began using methamphetamines as teens, partly because their father would hang out with them only if they were high, too. Nikki also apparently began to do sex work, according to information the police found on her social-media accounts.

It wasn't until Konrad's daughter, Tami-Ann, was born four years ago when members of the family started making strides to get and stay sober. Konrad started to drug test anyone who wanted to spend time with his daughter, including Nikki, who was determined to get sober to build a relationship with her niece.

Konrad said Nikki's relationship with her mother, Lisa Woods, grew even stronger after Nikki transitioned. As Nikki entered her teenage years, she and Woods spoke every day. They were more like friends than mother and daughter, he said.

Konrad and his mother spoke less often. It wasn't until two weeks after Nikki went missing when Woods reached out to let him know.

"She called me and she's like, 'Son, I haven't heard from Nikki in two weeks.' And I was like, 'Nikki's dead, straight up,'" Konrad recalled. "Nikki doesn't go two hours without texting my mom, let alone two weeks." 

The police first identified Bogdanov through Nikki's Snapchat account, where she had texted with him in the hours between meeting at the bar and reconnecting later that night. Authorities made several attempts to speak with him, while Nikki was still considered a missing person, but he fled to Ukraine the day Nikki disappeared. He was interviewed by the police for the first time four months later, after his return.

'I just got disgusted'

Bogdanov, born to Russian immigrant parents, immediately raised the specter of trans panic to the police.

"I was born here, but my culture, my roots, and everything it's for me it's even disturbing when I'm around like a gay person or somebody bi or transsexual or something," he told an officer. "I just got disgusted and I asked her to just get out. So for me it's just very disturbing and disgusting when people are like this."

In testimony at trial, he said he was "humiliated" when he learned he'd had sexual contact with a trans woman — and feared his family would shun him.

In that first interview, Bogdanov stopped short of admitting to the murder, claiming instead that he kicked Nikki out of his car and left.

Police report from the night Nikki was killed
An affidavit from a Vancouver police officer cites an interview with Nikki's killer, David Bogdanov, who said he was "really, really disturbed" to have been intimate with a trans girl.
Vancouver Police Department

On December 7, investigators found Nikki's body in a wooded area Bogdanov had visited near the time of her disappearance, according to phone records obtained by the police. He was arrested 10 days later.

After the arrest, local LGBTQ advocates joined forces with Woods to get a bill, the Nikki Kuhnhausen Act, introduced in the state legislature. It passed in 2020, before Bogdanov went to trial, banning the so-called trans-panic defense in the state.

At Bogdanov's 2021 trial, he instead claimed self-defense: that he strangled Nikki because she lunged for his gun. The jury didn't buy it.

Nikki was "120 pounds soaking wet with boulders in her pockets," Konrad said. He said she'd also been terrified of guns since being shot during a robbery about a year before her death.

Konrad told Insider he would never understand why Bogdanov chose to kill Nikki when he learned she was trans, instead of simply walking away.

"You know, just one little reason," Konrad said of Bogdanov. "It's over with. I'm not getting my sister back, homey. The least you could do is tell me why."

ikki Kuhnhausen's stepfather Vincent Woods, left, and mother Lisa Woods, right, listen to the judge during the bail review hearing for David Y. Bogdanov at Clark County Superior Court on Thursday morning, Jan. 2, 2020. Judge David Gregerson set $750,000 bail Thursday for Bogdanov, the suspect in the slaying of a transgender Vancouver teen Nikki Kuhnhausen.
Nikki Kuhnhausen's stepfather Vincent Woods, left, and mother Lisa Woods, center, are comforted by transgender activist Devon Davis Williamson at a bail hearing for David Bogdanov, January 2020.
Alisha Jucevic/The Columbian

Washington became the 10th state to ban the trans-panic defense, after California six years earlier. Today, it is illegal to raise the defense in court in 15 states and the District of Columbia. 

W. Carsten Andresen, a professor of criminal justice at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, has identified dozens of murder cases in which trans panic was used as an argument by the defense from 2000 to 2019, before most of the state bans passed. He told Insider the arguments usually involved allegations that the victim "tricked" or lured a male heterosexual defendant into sex, prompting a violent response.

Though Bogdanov was barred from using the defense, his testimony at trial still followed that script. He claimed on the stand that he discovered Nikki was trans while she was giving him oral sex in the backseat of his car.

"I'm thinking, I just was deceived by this person into oral sex and this person is high on meth, she's jumping for my gun," Bogdanov testified. "At this point, the overwhelming feeling and thought was — the fight-or-flight mode just kicks in — and all I can think was, 'Oh, my God, I'm going to get shot.'"

Bogdanov's self-defense claim never came up in his initial interviews with the police.

A trans-panic defense prevails

One of the highest-profile cases in which a panic defense was raised involved a Virginia Tech football player, Isimemen Etute. The 18-year-old was charged with the fatal beating of Jerry Smith, a gay man he'd met online as "Angie."

In court, Etute claimed self-defense, testifying that Smith had lunged for a small knife under his mattress before the killing. But prosecutors said at trial that Etute hadn't mentioned the knife to the police until after he was arrested and charged.

Isimemen Etute celebrates at the end of his trial in Montgomery County Circuit Court Friday, May 27, 2022 in Christiansburg Va.
Isimemen Etute celebrates his acquittal in the brutal killing of Jerry Smith in Blacksburg, Virginia, in 2021. His attorney deployed a "trans panic" defense.
Matt Gentry/The Roanoke Times via AP, Pool

In their investigation, the police learned that Etute and a teammate had met up with Smith for sex in April 2021 after meeting on Tinder.

The men got uncomfortable at Smith's apartment and left, but Etute returned for oral sex, for which he said he was paid $50. Etute testified that some of his teammates began teasing him that he might have hooked up with a man. 

Etute and two teammates went on another trip to Smith's apartment, this time apparently in an effort to determine Smith's biological sex. Etute told officers he entered the apartment alone and then "felt around'' and used a flashlight to investigate. When he confronted Smith, Etute testified, Smith reached for Etute's genitals and Etute slapped him. Then, Etute testified, he thought Smith might be reaching for a weapon, so he slugged Smith and then stomped on his face as he departed, ESPN reported

An autopsy report showed that the beating was brutal — nearly all the bones in Smith's face were broken, fragments of his teeth were missing, and he had brain bleeding, ESPN reported. Yet a jury accepted Etute's self-defense claim and acquitted him of all charges.

The case isn't included in Insider's database, as there is no evidence that Jerry Smith ever identified as trans or used she/her pronouns outside the one profile on Tinder. In court, family members described Smith as a proud gay man.

Yet immediately after Etute was charged, his attorney, James Turk, began building the case for trans panic.

"Nobody deserves to die, but I don't mind saying, don't pretend you are something that you are not," Turk said at an early court appearance. "Don't target or lure anyone under that perception. That's just wrong." In his closing argument, Turk made a show of choking up, praising Etute's character and accusing Smith of perpetrating a "deliberate, wicked sexual ruse."

As with Nikki, Smith's death coincided with passing of a state law banning the use of the gay- and trans-panic defense. But the judge in Etute's case ruled that the new legislation didn't apply because it took effect after the killing.

Delegate Danica Roem of Virginia, the nation's first openly trans state legislator, who filed the Virginia bill, told Insider that Turk's rhetoric, "trying to excuse a horrifying homicide of such epic proportion," was simply "wrong."

Danica Roem
Delegate Danica Roem of Virginia, the first openly transgender legislator in the country, who introduced a state bill barring the "trans panic" defense.
AP Photo/Steve Helber

"Since when is it OK, under any circumstance, to blame the victim for their own murder?" Roem said, adding that if "you have an encounter with an LGBTQ person" and "you find out about their sexual orientation, their gender identity, something about them that you don't like, at that point, you have every legal right in the world to stop and to walk away, to leave."

Konrad's question lingers. Why didn't these men just go home, delete their text messages, and chalk up the encounters as a bad episode they'd rather not repeat?

Why did so many killers and suspected killers in Insider's database melt down so spectacularly that they returned to kill their sexual partners in such a brutal manner?

Etute shattered nearly all the bones in Smith's face. Bogdanov strangled Nikki with nothing but his bare hands and a charging cable. Perez allegedly left Reyes-Hernandez's apartment after shooting her several times only to return again to riddle her dead body with more bullets. 

He left with a 'cold look'

The 2019 killing of Paris Cameron, a trans woman in Detroit, involved an explosion of gunfire so intense it left three dead. 

On May 25 of that year, Cameron was leaving a gas station in Southeast Detroit on her way to a house party with friends when she spotted a young man she found attractive and called out to him.

The gas station where Paris Cameron met Devon Robinson
The gas station where Paris Cameron, 20, met her killer, Devon Robinson, 18.
Sylvia Jarrus for Insider

She invited the 18-year-old, later identified by detectives as Devon Robinson, to the gathering, which evolved into a casual sex party.

Cameron and several gay men at the party performed oral sex on Robinson in an upstairs bedroom, according to testimony from a partygoer at the trial.

Some of the other guests laughed about Robinson, the partygoer testified, calling him a DL, or down low, a straight-identified man who has sex with men on the side. "He appeared as a heterosexual male," he testified, "but he was letting gay boys suck his penis."

A photo of a house behind trees
The house in Detroit where Paris Cameron and two other partygoers were killed.
Sylvia Jarrus for Insider

Robinson heard them joking, the partygoer testified, and left with a "cold look" on his face. Prosecutors presented the jury with surveillance video of Robinson after he exited the party. It shows him gagging and spitting on the ground.

About 20 minutes later, the group heard gunshots — a man in a ski mask had walked into the house and opened fire. 

Cameron, 20; Alunte Davis, 21; and Timothy Blancher, 20, were all shot dead.

"I was trying to help Paris," the partygoer testified at trial. "I couldn't tell where she was bleeding from, there was so much blood."

There's little in the police or court records that sheds light on why the teenage shooter reacted so strongly to his sexual experience at the party — or to the gossip he overheard right after. When detectives interviewed Robinson before his arrest, he acknowledged being at the party and engaging in oral sex with Cameron, according to video of the interview obtained by Insider. He told detectives he was gay, but he said his family didn't know and he didn't want them to find out. Later, at trial, prosecutors argued that he returned to the party with a gun to get rid of people who'd witnessed his sexual encounters.

In a later jailhouse phone call with his mother, which Insider obtained through a records request, Robinson's sense of shame seems palpable.

Photo of Paris Cameron
Paris Cameron came out to her mother as transgender just a year before she was killed.
Insider database of transgender homicides, 2017 – 2021

In the recording, he insists he isn't gay, but warns his mom that he told the police differently so they would take hate-crimes charges off the table. (In fact, Michigan's hate-crimes statute did not at the time cover crimes targeting LGBTQ people.)

"I told the police I was gay," he says.

"OK," his mom says, after a brief pause. "If you ever felt that way, don't ever be afraid to come to me with that shit."

"I'm not," he replies. "You know I'm not."

Robinson's mother says at one point that it doesn't make sense that he would commit a hate crime since there are lesbians in his family. But she goes on to police his masculinity later in the call, when he begins to choke up.

"You can't be crying in there, son," she said.

"It don't change my character. I got to let pain out," Robinson responded. "What's the use of having pain if you don't let it out?"

Cameron's mom, Lekenya Carter, told Insider that she was still reeling from her child's death. She said not a day went by without her missing her child, "no matter what his life was."

She said Cameron came out to her as gay at 13 but it was only a year before her death when Cameron told Carter she wanted to live as a woman.

Carter said that "out of respect" Cameron didn't go around to nieces or nephews dressed in women's clothes but did around her and her daughters.

"We understood. We had no problem," she said. "We weren't that type of family."

Of the murder cases for which Insider received substantial police records, Paris Cameron's and Nikki Kunhausen's were among the most extensively investigated. They are two of only 12 murder convictions at trial in the entire database.

In Vancouver, records show that the police solicited tips on Nikki's disappearance through a hotline and followed up on each of them. In court, prosecutors put Bogdanov's ex-girlfriend on the stand to prove to the jury that Bogdanov had a history of anti-LGBTQ hate.

In Detroit, the police relied on the city's Green Light surveillance system, which livestreams surveillance videos from participating businesses to the police. This allowed detectives "to get an image of the suspect right away," Cmdr. Michael McGinnis, who oversees the Detroit police's homicide unit, told Insider.

Critically, a team of special prosecutors and culturally competent investigators also worked with the local trans community to solicit information about what happened the night of the party where Cameron and her friends were killed.

By the time of Cameron's death, the Fair Michigan Justice Project had been operating in Detroit for three years. It was founded in 2016, after members of Detroit's trans community sounded the alarm about a spate of attacks targeting trans women. Other cities in Insider's database — Baltimore; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Jacksonville, Florida — have similar clusters of unsolved killings. But in Detroit, law enforcement responded with practical measures, launching a collaboration with Fair Michigan, a local LGBTQ nonprofit, to form a team of prosecutors and investigators whose sole focus is crimes against members of LGBTQ communities.

After Cameron's death, said Abad, the Justice Project's program director, "My inboxes, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, everything" were firing. When witnesses hesitated to testify, expressing concern that their family would find out about their sexuality or their presence at a sex party, investigators made "a hard plea to the community," Dani Woods, a Detroit police officer who serves as the department's LGBT liaison, told Insider.

A year after Cameron's murder, Robinson was convicted on three counts of murder and got three life sentences. 

A legacy of resilience

A year and a half later, in August 2021, Bogdanov was convicted of second-degree murder and a state hate-crime offense in Nikki's killing. The only hate-crimes conviction in a trans homicide over the past five years, it involved a white victim. Two other hate-crime cases in Insider's database remain in court. Bogdanov was sentenced to 19 ½ years in prison.

Nikki Kuhnhausen
Nikki Kuhnhausen
Courtesy of Konrad Kuhnhausen

In an email to Insider from the Coyote Ridge Corrections Center, Bogdanov insisted he didn't get a fair trial and said he was "praying" his conviction would be overturned on appeal. "They railroaded me at trial," he wrote, "and this isn't justice but a perversion of it."

During the trial, Konrad wasn't allowed into the courtroom. Because of previous arrests for violent offenses, he had to watch on a TV screen from a different part of the building. 

A mixed-martial-arts fighter and self-described "Super Juggalo," Konrad said he was grateful he was kept out, because at that time in his life he might have tried to attack Bogdanov or members of his family for taking his little sister from him.

Konrad said he'd stopped using hard drugs for six years now. And he is determined to raise his daughter, Tami-Ann, in the safe, stable environment that he and Nikki lacked.

He wants his daughter to have the same self-love, confidence, and resilience that her aunt was somehow born with.

Their mother, Lisa Woods, had also been trying to better herself for her granddaughter, Konrad said.

Then, on August 11, shortly after she spoke with Insider, Woods was found dead in the sober house where she was living.

A day earlier, in a brief phone call with Insider, Woods called the team that investigated and prosecuted Bogdanov her "angels."

Nikki and Konrad's father, Kane Kuhnhausen, also died unexpectedly, in January 2021. For Konrad, it's been more than three straight years of grief.

After each loss, though, Vancouver's LGBTQ community surrounded him and his family with support. The trans activists Linden Walls and Devon Davis Williamson formed the Justice for Nikki Task Force in January 2020 and helped teach Lisa Woods how to advocate on behalf of her daughter. The two activists have remained fixtures in Konrad's life.

When Woods died, the pair helped to organize a memorial for her in Esther Short Park, the same place where people gather on special occasions to memorialize Nikki. They also raised funds to buy urns for Woods' ashes, which were given to her surviving children.

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