Police in Greensboro, North Carolina, have arrested a 31-year-old man for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Quanesha “Cocoa” Shantel, a Black trans woman who was active in the ballroom and drag scene.
Ira Owens, a family friend who described himself as Shantel’s “drag father,” remembered her as “a loving and caring person” in an interview with the Greensboro News & Record. “She was just pretty as hell, and a bougie little thing,” Owens remembered fondly.
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According to The NC Beat, Greensboro police responded to reports of gunfire around 9:15 p.m. on Sunday, November 15, and found Shantel dead in her car where she had been shot multiple times through the driver’s side window. The News & Record reported that the shooting took place outside the apartment of Shantel’s ex-boyfriend, Jeremy Reynolds. Police later arrested Reynolds, charging him with first-degree murder and discharging a firearm into an occupied dwelling or vehicle.
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Owens told the News & Record that Shantel and Reynolds had dated for two years, but she had ended their relationship four months ago. “He kept bothering her with texts and would want to see her,” Owens said.
Shantel performed as Quanesha Shantel and went by Cocoa among friends.
Shantel’s mother, Toi Ni’Cole Ratliff, told the Greensboro News & Record that her daughter had come out as trans at a young age. “She came to me at age 11 and said, ‘Mama, I want to transition over,’” Ratliff said. “You wouldn’t imagine that a young person would know it at that age, but she did. And I told her, ‘I’ll support you through it. But if you do it, do it right.’ And she had it from there!”
Ratliff described a difficult adolescence for Shantel, who lost her father when she was two years old and was placed in juvenile detention for petty crimes as a teen. But in recent years, she’d reportedly come into her own as a performer, competing in ballroom competitions across the Southeast and in Chicago. She’d also recently enrolled in nursing school, which Owens described as “the perfect profession for her.”
“She was happy and full of joy, laughing,” Ratliff told the New & Observer of her last conversation with her daughter. “She didn’t mention any problems.”
According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Shantel is at least the 30th transgender or gender expansive person to die by violence in the U.S. this year. But as the LGBTQ+ rights organization frequently notes, the violent deaths of trans and gender-nonconforming people often go unreported and victims are frequently misgendered and misidentified by police, so this may only be a snapshot of the violence inflicted upon the trans community.
Black trans women are also disproportionately vulnerable to both intimate partner and gun violence, according to HRC. The organization notes that 26% of the transgender and gender-expansive victims of fatal violence it has tracked since 2013 were killed by romantic or sexual partners. Meanwhile, 62.5% of victims killed by an intimate partner were shot, as were 76.6% of victims who were Black trans women.
“The boys don’t want to love them out loud,” Owens said of the epidemic of intimate partner violence faced by transgender women. “That’s why so many girls end up dead.”
“Choosing violence against anyone for any reason is unacceptable and inexcusable as is the inaction by those in power who turn a blind eye to gun violence and transphobia to suit their own political agendas,” Tori Cooper, HRC Director of Community Engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative, said in a statement. “It’s time for communities across this country to reckon with the fact that their silence makes them complicit. Hateful stereotypes, rhetoric and legislation fuels violence against transgender people. We must demand better of our elected officials as well as each other.”
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