A transgender person who was stabbed last night at a Metrobus stop last night has died, WTOP reports.
The victim, whose name has not been released, was attacked in the 4800 block of East Capitol Street NE near Benning Road about 8:15 p.m. and later taken to Prince George’s County Hospital. Police are looking for a black male in his 40s wearing a black coat with a striped hat, WTOP reports.
Not many details of last night’s incident are known at this point, but this incident of a murder of a man dressed as a woman transgender person brings to memory the killing last September of Gaurav Gopalan, a 35-year-old man whose body was found on 11th Street NW in Columbia Heights. Gopalan, who worked as an aerospace engineer and was also the resident assistant director at Washington Shakespeare Company (now WSC Avant Bard), was ruled to have died blunt-impact head trauma. When Gopalan was found, he was dressed as a woman and was not carrying any identification; it took police three days to identify him, the City Paper’s Trey Graham reported at the time.
There was a spate of violence against transgender people in the District last summer. An NPR report on the wave of attacks noted the trend was shocking, but not surprising—a survey cited in that story said that nationally, 26 percent of transgender people have experienced some kind of physical assault.