Zoe Spears, a 23-year-old trans woman, was shot and killed in Fairmount Heights, Md. on June 13, mere blocks away from the spot where another black trans woman, Ashanti Carmon, was killed in March.

Now, her community is left mourning two losses in short succession, and grappling with fear for the safety of other trans women of color living in the D.C. area.

Police responded to a welfare check on the 600 block of Eastern Avenue just before midnight, Prince George’s County Police Major Brian Reilly said at a press conference last week. There, they found Spears on the sidewalk suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. She was pronounced dead on the scene.

Reilly said that it’s still unknown whether Spears’s death is related to Carmon’s, or whether there is any specific target on trans women on Eastern Avenue, an area straddling the D.C.-Maryland border that’s known as a gathering place for sex workers.

“What I can say to you is that it’s unusual that we had two murders like this within a couple blocks of each other,” he said. “What we would say to the community that’s out there is look out for each other.”

But Earline Budd, a transgender activist in D.C. who knew both of the women murdered this year, told DCist that she strongly believes the two deaths are related. Spears and Carmon were good friends, she says. And a week before Spears died, she texted Budd begging for help to be relocated out of her apartment on Eastern Avenue. She told Budd that she feared for her life because she witnessed Carmon’s murder months ago.

“She said, ‘Please help me Ms. Budd, I don’t want to die,'” says Budd, who described Spears as a “vibrant, high-spirited” young person. “We strongly believe this was a coordinated effort…of killing her because she was a witness to Ashanti Carmon’s murder,” Budd says. PGPD has declined to say if Spears was a witness to the murder, citing the active investigation into Carmon’s death.

Now, Budd says she is begging trans women to stay off Eastern Avenue altogether.

“Please, we are saying to the trans community, please avoid going on Eastern Avenue. Please. It’s not a safe space to go up there,” Budd says.

After Carmon died on March 30, friends and family needed help raising money for her funeral and set up a GoFundMe account. Budd says they will likely have to do the same thing for Spears’s funeral expenses. They will likely also hold a candlelight vigil, as they did for Carmon.

Spears’s family is currently on their way to D.C. to speak with her friends and discuss funeral arrangements, according to Budd. Meanwhile, her community in D.C. is still reeling from her death.

Ruby Corado, the executive director of LGBTQ community center Casa Ruby, tells DCist that she is devastated by Spears’s death. Spears was in a program with Casa Ruby for three years, Corado says, and the two were close—screenshots of text messages posted on Facebook show that Spears referred to Corado as “mom.”

“I want you to look at me, look at me in the face. This is what happens when people in our community get killed. You just see a story in the paper, you see a post on Facebook, you see an op-ed … you see people holding conferences. But the real consequences of violence look just like this,” Corado said in a video uploaded to Facebook, tears streaming down her face. “This is what violence does to our community. It’s not just about the killing, it’s not just about losing, it’s about the pain that we suffer.”

The day before she died, Spears texted Corado asking if she could send $10 for food. That was the last time Corado heard from her. Corado says that Spears loved working, and had seasonal work in retail, but struggled trying to get steady employment.

Corado says that Spears’s friends at Casa Ruby are “destroyed” by her death, and that the community in general is deeply affected by the loss of two people so close together. The sense of danger was compounded by an incident two days after Spears’s death, when Corado says a man showed up at Casa Ruby and threatened two trans clients with a gun. She is working with MPD and the D.C. Council to try to get extra security for the center.

But despite the danger, Corado does not plan to stop advocating for trans and gender non-conforming people in the area. In fact, she says that Casa Ruby is opening a new center in Southeast next week.

“We’re not going away, we’re not walking away,” she says. “If doing this work—and especially me as a leader—if this means I’m going to lose my life, then you know what? I did it for a good cause.”