Emmelia Talarico says she was emotionally and physically drained when she walked into the corner store near her house in Eckington on Tuesday.

Earlier in the night, a confrontation between neighbors across the street somehow ballooned to include some of her roommates and visitors, who had been sitting outside on the porch. Talarico lives in a home with six other trans women, often also providing meals and a place to stay for others who need it. As the confrontation escalated, the people across the street began yelling insults and slurs, calling some of the women by their dead names, Talarico says. The police eventually got involved and the situation calmed down, but the tension and stress lingered, Talarico says—especially after a week that had already been chock full of violence against LGBTQ people.

“After all this other stuff that had gone on, I’m just trying to get a bottle of water and a snack [at the corner store] and go home,” she says. When she was trying to leave, a woman was blocking the doorway, so Talarico ducked under her arm to get through, according to both her and a police report of the incident.

“Okay bro,” the woman said, shoving her in the back as she passed through, according to Talarico.

“I’m not a bro, don’t put your hands on me,” Talarico says she said back.

And then the woman and two other men with her started screaming, Talarico says. They called her homophobic slurs and threatened her with physical harm. She re-entered the store, and an employee asked the suspects to leave. When Talarico started walking home herself, she realized that the two men had stopped a ways ahead to wait for her, and she ran back into the store, Talarico says. A store employee had seen the men, too, and he let Talarico back into the store and then drove her home.

After she got home, shaken and describing to her roommates what had happened, they all suddenly heard two loud bangs near the window, she says. Talarico approached the window, and saw one of the men from the corner store pacing around her porch. He had hurled a rock at the window, but it hit the frame and didn’t break anything.

“He was moving in this really weird, evasive way,” Talarico says, that made her believe he had a gun. He started making gestures that suggested he was cocking a gun and getting ready to shoot, she says.

Terrified, she and her roomates fled to the basement and called 911. Two police officers arrived about half an hour later, and the man had already gone, Talarico says. The Metropolitan Police Department is investigating the incident as potentially being “motivated by hate or bias,” according to a spokesperson.

Now, Talarico says she and the other women who live in her home are trying to get around exclusively by ridehailing services to avoid being out on streets that have come to feel deeply unsafe.

It is the latest in a string of violent incidents against LGBTQ people that have prompted the community to ask for more protection and resources from the city.

Last week, Zoe Spears, a 23-year-old trans woman, was shot and killed in Fairmount, Maryland. She’s the second trans woman to be killed in that area this year. Then two days later, a man showed up to LBTQ community Center Casa Ruby, demanded a sex act, and threatened several trans clients with a gun. Over the weekend, three people were stabbed inside a Dupont gay bar, and a gay couple was badly beaten and robbed on U Street.

And these incidents came after there was a mass panic at the Capital Pride parade due to (ultimately false) claims about an active shooter.

A collection of LGBTQ ANC comissioners in the city is troubled by the uptick in violence, and they say city leaders aren’t doing enough to stop it. LGBTQ community groups had requested an increase in city funding in this year’s budget, and they didn’t get it.

“The Council’s silence on hate crimes and transgender violence, its refusal to provide even $1 in increased funding for the Office of Human Rights and Office of LGBTQ Affairs that 15 organizations advocated for, its failure to address anti-LGBTQ discrimination and violence, and its lack of action to ensure that we have safe and respectful housing and job opportunities for LGBTQ people of all ages—and in particular trans women of color—deeply concerns and disgusts us,” the letter reads.

The commissioners are asking for a minimum of $5 million in funding for LGBTQ advocacy and community organizations.

On Friday evening, the groups are hosting a vigil in Dupont Circle in protest of the several recent acts of violence, where Talarico is slated to speak. She is still feeling shaken and anxious after what happened, she says.

“I’m feeling exhausted, I’m feeling really tense. On Wednesday and through parts of yesterday it was really hard for me to be in crowds, I was looking over my shoulder,” she says.

She also says that although people are paying a lot of attention to incidents of hate in the last week, she experiences aggression and bias from people on the street every day of her life.

“The way people are talking about this is making it sound like a new thing, but this happens to me all the time,” she says. “This is like the tenth time this month that something like this happens to me.”

Previously:
After String Of Violent Incidents, LGBTQ Community Groups Plan A Vigil