Family members are calling for a hate crime investigation after a transgender woman was killed in a weekend shooting on the West Side.
Reed, also known as Barbie to her friends, was shot and killed early Sunday in the 4500 block of West Monroe Street. Another person was critically wounded in the shooting, according to Chicago police.
Maria Phillips, Reed's cousin, said she received a call from a close friend screaming, “Reed don't move… she just got shot.”
She kept calling for updates, only to finally be told that her cousin, 26, was gone.
The couple grew up together, like siblings, in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, Phillips told the Sun-Times on Monday.
“We were very close, she was always the person that no matter what challenges she faced, she always came out on top,” she said.
Reed transitioned to the opposite sex when she was sixteen, and although she remained close to her relatives, she found a community of chosen family members.
Phillips held a memorial balloon release on Sunday, and was shocked to see how many people came to express their grief, and how much her cousin meant to them.
“I know how I love her and how I feel about her, but the way they feel is different,” Phillips said.
A memorial service was held at the crime scene, but Phillips couldn't bear to stay there for long. Blood was still splattered on the sidewalk, and duct tape still marked the spot where her cousin had died.
“We all ran, and he kept shooting.”
Michelle Lee was with Reed and other friends early Sunday morning at the corner of Monroe Street and Kenton Avenue. Lee and Reed had been best friends since they were teenagers.
Around 1:30 a.m. Sunday, Lee and Reed saw a man, whom they had seen in the area before, walk toward another group of people.
He told me he approached a girl in that group and left the area.
About 30 minutes later, the man returned to the intersection and opened fire, Lee told the Sun-Times.
“We heard one shot, and we all ran,” he told me. “No one looked at us… We all ran. And he kept shooting.”
More than 15 bullet casings from a rifle were found at the scene.
Police said Reed was shot multiple times in the leg and back.
Another person, a 34-year-old man, was shot in the chest and taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in critical condition, police said.
Lee and the others returned to the building to find Reid on the floor; “We all started crying.”
Reid's profile picture. | Provided
“She wanted to be loved and respected.”
As of Tuesday, there were no indications that police were investigating the shooting as a hate crime.
But Reed's family believes she and others were targeted because of their transgender identity.
“I feel like it was a hate crime,” Phillips told the Sun-Times. “I want to start making people aware that there are people who are attacking this community. I want people to know that they are under attack.”
According to the Human Rights Campaign, 25 transgender and transgender people have been killed across the country so far this year. About 44% of those killed were black transgender women.
Reed is the first transgender woman to be killed in Chicago this year, though violence against transgender women often goes unreported.
At least 14 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been murdered in Chicago since 2016, according to data compiled by the Sun-Times, and the majority of those cases remain unsolved.
“Why isn’t this making the news?” trans activist Zahra Bassett asked Monday. “A black trans woman was murdered for no reason on the West Side of Chicago, an area that is under-resourced and has been under-resourced when it comes to the LGBTQI community for decades and continues to be.”
Bassett is the founder and CEO of Life is Work, a West Side-based nonprofit that provides housing assistance, workforce development, HIV testing and other services to transgender people of color.
“This was a 26-year-old child, this is a 26-year-old child, and his life was horribly violated,” she said.
Reed's cousin, Phillips, was told there was video footage of the alleged shooter, but as of Tuesday she had not received any updates from police.
The friends are still struggling to accept the fact that Red was taken from them in such a violent way.
“One thing about Reid is she wasn’t a bad girl,” Lee told the Sun-Times. “Her life was basically like Nicki Minaj’s life. She loved Nicki Minaj.”
“There was something special about Nicky,” another friend, Trevon Pope, said with a laugh.
“She wanted to be loved and respected. That's what she was. That's not something she played with. She loved and respected people,” the pope added.
