Ali He’Shun Forney, also known as Luscious, was a transgender youth who was originally from North Carolina, but moved with his mother to Brooklyn, New York when he was still quite young. After being rejected by his family when they found out about his sexuality, Ali went to live in a series of foster homes, but eventually decided that he would rather live on the streets. He began engaging in sex work when he was thirteen years old, and began using drugs soon afterward as a way of dealing with the trauma of the way he made his living.
By the time he was seventeen, though, he seemed to be turning his life around. He got his GED, and also joined the Safe Horizon program, a nonprofit which sought to help victims of abuse and violent crime. Through their auspices, he soon became a peer counselor, teaching street kids about safety and AIDS prevention. He was also quite vocal about advocating for more police investigation into the killings of non-gender-conforming youth on the streets of New York.
But at approximately four a.m. on December 5th, 1997, Ali Forney, then twenty-two-years old, was found dead of a single gunshot wound to the head in front of a housing project on East 131st Street in Harlem. Authorities noted that his was the third murder of a transgender sex worker over the previous year and two months: twenty-one-year-old Dion Webster had been stabbed in the head in East Harlem in November of 1996, while twenty-five-year-old Kevin “Kiki” Freeman was stabbed with a screwdriver in May of 1997, in the same area. None of these murders has been solved, though a new push for information in all three crimes was announced in 2016.
In 2002, a man named Carl Siciliano, who had been friends with Ali, founded the Ali Forney Center in New York City, in order to provide aid, shelter, food, and social services for homeless LBGT youth. The Center now provides help to over one thousand homeless teens in Manhattan and Brooklyn every year.
Crime Immemorial 