Fifty-one-year-old Terrianne Summers had spent the first part of her life as Gary, and had served twenty-two years as an engineer in the Navy under that moniker, eventually attaining the rank of Commander. She had also married and fathered two sons.
But in the late 1990s, Terrianne realized she could no longer stifle her true identity, and came out as trans to her wife and children. The conversation did not go well, and Terrianne subsequently became estranged from her family, though she continued to pay alimony to her estranged wife out of her Navy pension.
Over the following years, finding work would prove difficult, as Terrianne was often discriminated against, but she was finally able to secure an IT position with the US Department of Labor in 2000. She also started to become active in the LGBT community in and around her home in Jacksonville, Florida, volunteering with the Jacksonville Area Sexual Minority Youth Network and participating in protests against job discrimination against LGBT employees and applicants. In late November, too, she had attended the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, an event commemorating the lives of trans people who were the victims of hate crimes.
In December of 2001, Terrianne was living with her disabled friend and roommate in a less-than-ideal neighborhood on the Westside, one where gangs of teenagers roamed the streets dealing drugs, breaking into homes, and getting into fights. Terrianne, never one to back down from a confrontation herself, often called the authorities on these miscreants, and had received threats from them on several occasions. Terrianne, who owned a .357 and was not afraid to use it, refused to be intimidated by the teenagers.
On the evening of Monday, December 12th, 2001, Terrianne arrived home from work at her regular time, and, as was her routine, immediately went to the mailbox at the end of the driveway to pick up the day’s mail.
At approximately eight p.m., neighbors phoned police and reported shots fired, though it seems that officers did not respond immediately, at least until another neighbor called and said that a group of teenagers on bicycles had ridden by at a quarter past nine and said that there was a dead woman lying in the street. The dead woman was Terrianne Summers.
The victim had been shot, and had fallen instantly to the pavement. Terrianne’s purse and the mail she had just removed from the box were all scattered next to her body. The force of the gunshot had also knocked off one of her shoes.
Investigators immediately suspected that a group of teenagers from the neighborhood was responsible for the slaying, and interviewed all of the youths extensively, particularly those who Terrianne had called the authorities on in the past. However, police were unable to gather enough evidence to charge any of the adolescents; many of them, it should be noted, went on to commit other crimes subsequently.
One infuriating aspect of the case was the fact that even among neighbors who were interviewed as possible witnesses in the investigation, there was marked hostility toward the victim, with many of the neighbors referring to Terrianne as a “faggot,” “fairy,” or “sissy.” And to add insult to injury, the police report itself insisted upon referring to Terrianne as a male.
Despite all of this rancor toward the victim’s gender identity, and despite the fact that Terrianne Summers was well-known as a transgender activist in the community—having been prominently featured in newspaper photographs of a discrimination protest not long before her murder—authorities stated that they were not investigating her homicide as a hate crime, instead theorizing that the killing was simply retaliatory, or done in the course of a robbery (though her purse was untouched). LGBT activist have long been putting pressure on investigators to admit that the assassination-style killing was hate-motivated, but as of this writing, the crime is still not classified as such, and absolutely no arrests have been made.
Crime Immemorial 