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Initial reports characterized her death as a hit-and-run, but then it was discovered she had been shot.
Shannon Boswell, a Black transgender woman just days from her 31st birthday, was shot and killed last Tuesday in Stone Mountain, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta.
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Initial reports misgendered her and characterized her death as the result of a hit-and-run accident. But the DeKalb County medical examiner later discovered she had been shot, according to several local news outlets.
Boswell “was shot and then left in the street like a deer,” her mother, Tammy Boswell, told Atlanta TV station WSB. “Shannon was really a very sweet person ... and ain’t nobody have a right to take [her] from me.”
Tammy Boswell said several of Shannon’s friends and her boyfriend said she had been shot, so she kept calling the police with that information, but they denied there had been a shooting until the medical examiner’s report came out.
A resident of the area, who declined to be identified, told the station there was “a gunshot and then a few seconds later, it sounded like a car crash or like someone going over the median or something like that. It was very fast, very like, what’s just going on.”
DeKalb County police are asking for anyone with information about the incident to contact them. The department’s non-emergency number is (404) 294-2911.
Boswell is at least the 19th trans person to die by violence in the U.S. this year. However, many such deaths go unreported or misreported, with the victims deadnamed or misgendered by media and police. In any given year, the majority of the victims are Black women.
