Trans Latina Meraxes Medina killed in Los Angeles

Meraxes Medina, a 24-year-old transgender Latina, was shot to death March 21 in Los Angeles.

Police responded to a call about 4:30 a.m. that day and found her on the street on the city’s south side, having been shot in the head, the Los Angeles Timesreports. She had been dumped from a car. She was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

The Times story did not state Medina’s name, but her identity was confirmed by friends on a GoFundMe page. Another woman, apparently cisgender, was fatally shot in the same neighborhood two days earlier. The area is known for sex work, and police have said the women had been engaged in sexual encounters that led to violence. The deaths remain under investigation.

Medina, who turned 24 in February and recently begun hormone therapy, had worked as a makeup artist at Universal Studios. She was undocumented and had experienced homelessness. But friends were predicting great things for her.

“She left an impression on everybody,” her longtime friend Alejandro Fernandez told officials at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. “She was someone you weren’t going to forget. She had this aura about her, and everywhere we went, people would turn around. She had so much potential. I was waiting for her to be an influencer and blow up. I would tell her, ‘Girl, I’m waiting for your moment because you’re already the bomb.’”

Another friend, Alisha Veneno, told the center, “We were just trying to make it in life. We didn’t know what we wanted to do or where we wanted to go, but we wanted to go somewhere.” Veneno said she knew something was wrong when she didn’t see any recent activity from Medina on Instagram, where she normally posted several times a day, displaying her skills with makeup.

“Meraxes was a young woman who deserved to live out a long and fulfilling life,” Tori Cooper, director of community engagement for the Human Rights Campaign’s Transgender Justice Initiative,” said in a press release. “At just 24 years old, she had so much more to give. Yet again, we find ourselves honoring the life and mourning the loss of someone from our transgender community killed by gun violence, and that alarming reality should emphasize our collective need to fight against lax gun laws. We need to come together and remind everyone, especially lawmakers and politicians, that our lives are worth saving and worth living.”

“Violence against transgender and gender-expansive people is a gun violence issue,” the groups Everytown for Gun Safety and Students Demand Action posted on Instagram. “In 2023, 80% of homicides of trans people were with a gun, and 60% of victims were under 30. … Trans people deserve to live freely without fear of gun violence. They deserve to grow old. We can and must #DisarmHate by simultaneously fighting discriminatory anti-LGBTQ+ policies and attempts to weaken gun laws.”

“A predator stalking sex workers is something we must attend to with all haste,” added Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents.“It is far too easy for these women (in this case) to be overlooked because of society’s practice of dehumanizing sex workers.”