'Every day we go out on the streets, we are taking a risk'

WASHINGTON — We don't know whether Ashanti Carmon knew exactly what was coming. But we know she was afraid.

In the early-morning hours of March 30, 2019, Carmon, 27, and her friend Zoe Spears, 23, were working Eastern Avenue, a well-known sex-work stroll that straddles the border between Maryland and Washington, DC, not far from the National Arboretum. They had arranged for a date that would pay them $800 each, but toward the end, Carmon was anxious to leave. She was "stressed out in the face," Spears later told the police. She asked their date to hurry up and quit the chitchat so everyone could be on their way.

Finally, the date peeled off in a blue car. But another man in a white car pulled up to the women, who were just a few blocks from Spears' apartment.

This man was angry, Spears said to the police. "Bitch, I thought I told you," he told Carmon. "You weren't leaving out of this."

Carmon, however, told him she wanted out. She was engaged to a man who loved her, Philip Williams, and referred to herself as "Mrs. Ashanti Williams" on Facebook. She had at least one other job, at a local Dunkin', that, while less lucrative than sex work, came with far less stress; she was on the verge of becoming a manager there.

The man asked Carmon whether she wanted to "take this route," Spears recounted, but Carmon held her ground.

He pulled out a gun and shot her three times. When she collapsed on the ground, he fired off an extra two.

He pulled Spears, screaming and crying, into his car. He put a plastic shopping bag down so her dress, stained with Carmon's blood, wouldn't touch the seat cushion. "Let's go," he said, "or you're going to catch the same fate."

In May, Spears met with the police to share her version of what happened. She told them about the man, including the color of the sweatshirt he wore that night, and a phone number she believed was connected to him.

Within weeks of the interview, she, too, was fatally shot, by a man in a silver Dodge Caravan. Her body was found just two blocks from where Carmon died.

'Do not go on Eastern Avenue'

The stories of these two women, both of whom were transgender, echo across "Deaths in the Family," Insider's investigation into fatal violence against transgender and gender nonconforming people from 2017 to 2021. Like Carmon and Spears, nearly two-thirds of the 175 transgender people killed over those five years were Black women. We found evidence that at least 33 of those killed had engaged in sex work; at least 20 of them were killed on the job. Like Spears, at least 20 of those killed were or had previously been homeless.

Because many of Insider's records requests were denied or heavily redacted, the circumstances surrounding 79 of the killings remain unknown, so these numbers are almost certainly an undercount. Still, economic vulnerability was a reality for dozens and inevitably increased their exposure to violence.

For Spears and Carmon, their vulnerability was intertwined with Eastern Avenue. And like many American thoroughfares paved through historically Black communities, Eastern Avenue was shaped by segregation.

Nearby, in northeastern Washington, DC, racial covenants legally prohibited Black Americans from owning homes until 1948. In the ensuing years, as Black people began moving into the area, white flight took hold, and economic disinvestment further transformed the area. In pop culture, Eastern Avenue has been a muse of crime fiction. "The Big Blowdown," a novel set in the 1940s by the "Wire" writer and producer George Pelecanos, uses the boulevard to illustrate the seediness of Washington's outskirts, describing "gambling joints" and an "Eastern cat-house."

Among sex workers in the area, including transgender sex workers, Eastern Avenue is known as one of a few strips where dates can dependably be found — but at great cost.

"It's a very violent part of the city," Charmaine Eccles said over dinner at a Thai restaurant in the Northeast, about two miles from where Spears was killed. Eccles, a transgender advocate, was born and raised in the District and knew both Spears and Carmon. She vividly remembers when Eastern's low-lit streets, once populated by cisgender sex workers, eventually became a place for transgender women. "Some of the girls infiltrated the neighborhood," she said, "and next thing you know, it was recognized as a stroll for trans people."

Kaniya Walker, a public-health worker and transgender advocate in Prince George's County, believes that transgender sex workers there are frequently targeted for robbery and assault because they're seen as unprotected and likely to be carrying cash. "The only reason the violence is there is they know the trans girls be there," she said. Long before Carmon and Spears, other transgender women were murdered on blocks near the avenue, including Lashai Mclean in 2011 and Deeniquia "Dee Dee" Dodds in 2016.

Experts told Insider the built environment — how the street is designed — is a particular impediment to the safety of the community. Dan Read, a regional policy director of Greater Greater Washington, said that when he drives past areas like Eastern Avenue into more affluent areas of Washington, "you can feel a knob turning that communicates, 'We give a shit.'"

The emphasis on cars, he said, means that strolls like Eastern Avenue don't prioritize pedestrian safety. "The lights shine on the road and not the sidewalk," he said. "You literally don't have visuals on the street."

Walking down Eastern Avenue, including the blocks where Spears and Carmon were murdered, Reed's description hits home. As dusk turns to night, the streets are as dark as they are empty. The sidewalks are often narrow, hardly able to fit two people walking side by side. And despite its many homes and apartments, crosswalks are few and far between.

Eccles said men had assaulted her at gunpoint on both Eastern Avenue and K Street, another prominent stroll about eight miles away. But unlike Eastern Avenue, she said, the area around the K Street stroll is bustling, with storefronts and restaurants on the ground floors of newly constructed residential high rises.

For Spears, who lived and worked on Eastern Avenue, the dangers were always just outside her door. And she hated it.

"She most certainly made it clear that she did not want to continue to live on Eastern Avenue," said Earline Budd, who knew Spears well as a case manager for Honoring Individual Power and Strength, a Black- and transgender-led nonprofit that does regular outreach to sex workers in the Washington area. "And that was because Eastern Avenue was so close to everything," especially the pull of sex work and drugs.

Budd said the dangers facing transgender people weren't limited "to any one place" in the Washington area. But in 2019, after losing Spears and Carmon in the same area, within blocks of each other, she issued a warning: "Do not go on Eastern Avenue."

A community and a police department at odds

Charmaine Eccles first met Spears through friends in 2019 while working as a director of programs at Casa Ruby, a transgender-led shelter. "Oh, my God, I couldn't stand her," Eccles said over dinner. "But I loved her." She said Spears, whom she called her chosen daughter, carried herself "like she ran the show."

"That bitch was like, y'all can't tell me nothing."

Spears was ambitious, she said. She wanted a stable job in service of the transgender community, and she'd considered enrolling in nursing school. She also struggled with drug addiction, like several other transgender people killed over the past five years, and may have found her way back to working Eastern Avenue after relapsing. Eccles had known Carmon, meanwhile, since around 2007. Talking about Carmon brought her to tears. "She didn't have, like, one malicious bone in her. It was like — even if she wanted to get mad, you couldn't tell."

As Eccles tells it, she met Carmon when both of them were homeless, staying afloat by working the stroll on Eastern Avenue. Both women were young, but Carmon was just a teenager, having been pushed out by her family after she transitioned.

They looked out for each other. Eccles remembered a time when Carmon came up and asked what she was doing. "Y'all having fun?" she asked. "Not really," Eccles answered. "We're fuckin' smoking crack." Carmon asked to join, but Eccles shut it down, wanting to protect her. Later, when Carmon found a place to stay, she returned the favor, letting Eccles take showers there.

While we don't know the precise contours of Spears and Carmon's relationship, we know that they occasionally met up for dates together, which is how Spears found herself on Eastern Avenue the night of Carmon's murder.

Nearly two months after Carmon's brutal killing, Spears responded to a $25,000 reward posted by the Prince George's County Police Department. She told the police she hoped to collect the reward to pay for an apartment far away from Eastern Avenue.

It was likely a difficult decision to speak with the police. According to records of her interview, she said she had previously been raped by a police officer. She also said the man who killed Carmon had threatened her life after the murder, including one instance in which he struck her in the face multiple times.

Still, she sat for a three-hour interview.

Spears said she didn't know the man's real name but knew him by a nickname, and she gave the police his phone number. (According to public records, the number is linked to a man with multiple felony charges; Insider isn't naming him because he hasn't been charged in Carmon's death.) She also identified him among photos presented by the police.

According to the documents, Spears made multiple calls to the Metropolitan Police Department after Carmon's death in March, saying she was being harassed by her "drug dealer." In May, she requested protection orders against two men she said harassed her after she witnessed the murder. Prince George's police records indicate that the orders, copies of which were obtained from the Metro police, were never served. A spokesperson for the Metro police told Insider neither order was sent to the department to assist with service, and asserted that Spears herself was responsible for either serving them or requesting the Metro police's help. (Because of privacy restrictions, Insider was not able to independently verify whether the orders were served.) Records show the Metro police put her up in a hotel for her protection.

Still, on June 13, 2019, just weeks after speaking with the police, Spears was again out walking Eastern Avenue in search of a date. According to surveillance footage of the scene, she was approached by a silver minivan. Within a few minutes, the driver pulled out a gun and shot her.

Earline Budd and others in the community think the killings may have been connected. "Whomever had killed Carmon may have — I'll say it that way — put out information," Budd said. "If you see Spears, call me and I'll give you so-and-so's" contact information.

"That's how we believe that the guy that rode her down and shot her to death knew that she was out there," Budd added. "Someone had notified someone."

Then and now, Budd believes Spears feared for her life. "Please help me, Ms. Budd, I don't want to die," Spears told Budd, according to an interview Budd gave just days after Spears' death.

In records of Spears' interviews with the Prince George's and the Metro police, she described receiving death threats at least three separate times. In one instance, Spears told the police she was stabbed, beaten, and held at gunpoint inside her home.

Yet the police have repeatedly denied any connection. "There is no link, as of this moment, between these two cases," said then-Criminal Investigation Commander Brian Reilly in July 2019.

In a statement provided to Insider in November, Prince George's police again denied any link. "We have uncovered no evidence connecting the murders of Ashanti Carmon and Zoe Spears," Detective Shaniece Singh wrote in an email. "Detectives working to identify the suspect in Ashanti's case thoroughly investigated all information provided to them by those who knew her, to include Spears."

The department itself has been in relative turmoil. Chief Hank Stawinski resigned in 2020 amid a lawsuit filed by 13 officers alleging widespread discrimination on the force against officers of color and civilians in the county. Meanwhile, Eccles said the force's LGBTQ outreach team, created in the wake of Spears' death, "died down" soon after it was announced; in Singh's email to Insider, she noted that the LGBTQ outreach team was available to the local community. She cited the coronavirus pandemic as the reason meetings and events were hindered.

But Kaniya Walker shut down the ongoing pandemic as a possible excuse. "I don't think it's because of COVID," she said, noting that other police activity, like arrests, continued throughout the early months of the pandemic. "People talk a good game."

Surviving sex work

In July 2019, after the police obtained the security-camera footage of Spears' killing, Gerardo Thomas, 33, was charged in her murder. According to public records, two email addresses connected to Gerardo include the phrase "HITMAN J." Thomas pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and a judge later sentenced him to 45 years in prison.

Carmon's murder investigation, however, "remains open," according to the Prince George's police. The $25,000 reward is still available to anyone who comes forward with information that leads to an indictment, though Spears' death may well be a deterrent.

The fate of Carmon's case mirrors those of many others in Insider's database: One-third of cases remain open and unsolved, many despite the presence of eyewitnesses. Outcomes like Carmon's are also twice as common in homicides with Black victims than white ones.

For transgender sex workers like Carmon and Spears, the threat of violence is particularly acute. Intimate violence by partners, family, dates, or clients accounted for almost half of the killings of transgender women over the past five years where the circumstances are known.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, Jaida Peterson, 29, and Remy Fennell, 28, were found dead inside their respective hotels within days of each other. Dominique Lucious, 26, was killed inside her Springfield, Missouri, apartment; the police connected her death to a man she met online. Sasha Garden, 27, was found naked and dead behind an Orlando, Florida, apartment complex, in a neighborhood where a friend said she had sought out dates before.

Strolls like Eastern Avenue show up again and again as crime scenes. In 2018, Shantee Tucker, described by friends as a "local legend," was shot eight times on Old York Road, a well-known spot for sex work in Philadelphia. In 2015, a 22-year-old Black transgender woman named Keisha Jenkins was killed in the area by a group of men. Sasha Garden's body was found in 2018 near Orange Blossom Trail, a roughly 7-mile stroll cutting through central Florida.

Five of the six known cases in which serial killers were responsible involved sex workers, including Janelle Ortiz, who was allegedly murdered by a Border Patrol agent in Texas. He described his alleged victims, all sex workers, as "scum of the earth." Sex work is also closely tied to police violence. An analysis of the 2015 US Transgender Survey, the largest-ever study of transgender lives, found that transgender sex workers were roughly 11 times more likely to report being forced to perform sex acts with the police to avoid arrest than those who weren't engaged in sex work.

Much of the exposure to those extreme forms of violence comes from the barriers transgender women of color face in securing safe housing and safe jobs.

According to the Movement Advancement Project, 17 states don't protect transgender people from employment discrimination. Nineteen states don't protect transgender people from discrimination in housing. While one study found LGBTQ youth had double the risk of their straight peers of becoming homeless, 15 states allow foster-care agencies to discriminate against queer families who could welcome them in; an additional six states allow discrimination against transgender families.

The 2015 US Transgender Survey points to the extreme economic marginalization that results, at least in part, from this wall of discrimination. Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they lived in poverty — 38% among Black respondents — compared with the national rate of 12%. Transgender people of color reported an unemployment rate of 20%, four times the national rate at the time. One in 12 respondents reported being kicked out of the house when they came out to their family as transgender; one in 10 reported that they ran away from home. More than half of young people who were out as transgender in school said they'd been verbally harassed, and a quarter said they'd been physically assaulted. One in six reported leaving school because the mistreatment was so bad, potentially limiting future job opportunities. Gender-affirming care, meanwhile, is often prohibitively expensive, and can be a drain on already-limited finances.

"Every day we go out on the streets, we are taking a risk," Charmaine Eccles said. "Many jobs were not available to us," she continued, citing discrimination "at the door."

"We had to figure out a way out of no way," she added, "just to survive, just to eat, just to pay for a hotel room."

Shareese Mone, a transgender advocate who works with Honoring Individual Power and Strength, said sex work was too often "survival work" for transgender women, especially for those, like Carmon, who are rejected by their families because of their identity. A lack of proper protections, and the reality of living in a culture where transphobia is common, often push transgender women like Carmon and Spears into marginal economies.

"Being out on that stroll is a lot of survival work," Mone said. "Understanding that we are out there to make a living, to eat, so that we can lay for the night. You know, everybody doesn't have that family support that you can go back home to or that ability to come up out of drag and then go back home as a boy or as a girl."

Walker said job training — like the kind she received through the Department of Health, which helps LGBTQ people enter the public-health field — was a helpful resource for transgender women. But she said that having safe, stable and affordable housing was a necessary prerequisite. "If you don't have housing," she said, it's difficult to shower and "to get dressed for interviews."

"We not only need to work in DC," Mone said. "We need to work everywhere. We need to understand how this community needs to be accepted."

'A hard pill to swallow'

Over dinner in September, Eccles told the story of a scar she got on Eastern Avenue, on a "cold as shit" February night in 2016.

A man walked past her on the street. "Then, seconds later, I felt something on my back," she said. He told her to "give me everything you have" before trying to grab her purse. She tussled with him and fell onto the concrete. "Next thing you know," she said, "something was on my leg and he shot me. It was a direct hit on my femur." She remembered the man snarling, with his gun pointed at her head, "You dumbass bitch, I could kill you," before taking off with her purse. She was a block away from where Carmon was killed three years later.

She said she lay alone on Eastern Avenue as rain started to pour. Unable to get up, she called 911, and, drawing from her past experience working as a 911 transcriber and trainer, she carefully guided a dispatcher how to find her as quickly as possible. She said the surgery lasted nine hours. Had the emergency crew not arrived quickly, she fears, she might have died.

Today, she has a metal rod in her leg. She said it improved her posture. Standing at 6-foot-7, she beamed when explaining that the hunk of metal made her even taller.

After that night, she stopped working on Eastern Avenue. She wants transgender women to get out — off of the Avenue and out of sex work altogether.

"It's kind of like an automatic learned behavior," she said. "Like you transition to being Black in the city and one of the first things that you are told is: 'OK girl, go and get some money. Go trick, go post an ad.'"

Though Eccles stressed that "there's nothing wrong with prostitution," she believes other, safer opportunities are available.

She found work with Casa Ruby, the trans-led shelter. In 2021, she received a DC Black Pride award for her activism and advocacy in the transgender community. Accolades, however, don't pay the bills. A year later, Eccles said, she was fired from Casa Ruby. Soon after, the organization lost an $800,000 contract with the city.

One of the few trans-led resources to help sex workers find a path to stability had shuttered amid reported mismanagement and a lack of funds.

Her recent stretch of unemployment was punctuated by the loss of her brother. After she struggled to obtain food stamps, she returned to K Street to fill her fridge. After her first interview with Insider, a date assaulted and robbed her in her home.

Some weeks later, Insider spoke with Eccles again to check in, and to ask what she appreciated most on the other side of surviving those near-fatal encounters. "Nature," she replied.

"I appreciate air," she said. "I appreciate water. I appreciate the trees, the grass, the ants, the bugs."

"It's free," she said. "I mean, who knows? Monday, they might start putting a price on air. But, for right now, that's what I love. I appreciate the little things in life. Life goes on. It does, even though it's a hard pill to swallow. But it does."

• Read more from Insider's "Deaths in the Family" project on transgender homicides:
• Introduction and key findings
• Killings driven by transphobia
• Law enforcement killings