Family of Transgender Alabama Teen Tayy Dior Thomas Blames Her ‘trusting and Loving Nature’ for Untimely Death
The family of Tayy Dior Thomas, who was shot and killed in Mobile last month, hopes that Alabama’s hate crimes law will be changed.
Thomas was shot and killed on May 7 on Mobile’s Darwood Drive.
Family members say that Thomas’s partner killed her because they were afraid that their relationship would be found out. Thomas was transgender.
Carl Mitchell Washington, Jr. was caught and charged with killing Thomas. According to court records, he is being held without release at the Mobile Metro Jail on charges of murder and shooting a gun into a car that was occupied.
According to court records, Washington is said to have fired 18 rounds into Thomas’ car.
At 3:30 a.m. on May 7, Mobile police said they were called to a report of shots fired. Thomas was dead in the front yard when the cops arrived. A car had crashed into a house.
On June 17, the preliminary meeting is set to take place.
Thomas’s grandmother, Rolanda Carl, said she was a kind and lovely woman who loved kids and was always ready to watch her four younger brothers or cousins.
The thing about her nature that Carl liked most about her was that she was kind. “She was killed because she was so trusting and loving.”
Carl said that Thomas and Washington had been seeing each other for more than a year but didn’t tell anyone.
Carl thinks Washington killed Thomas because he knew that Thomas could find out about their friendship. Carl remembered that Thomas still had dried-out tear marks on her face when her family went to see her at the funeral home. “I want Washington to have enough time in there to feel bad about what he did and care about other people,”
Carl says she hopes that Thomas’ death will get a lot of attention across the country and lead to changes in the law that will let Washington be charged with a hate crime under state law.
The NAACP says that Alabama’s hate crime law does not make crimes prompted by sexual orientation or gender identity more serious.
A big LGBTQ rights group called the Human Rights Campaign did a study in 2023 that found that more than 20% of transgender and gender-expansive people who were killed were killed by a romantic, sexual, or close relationship.
From April to May of this year, HRC says that Thomas was the sixth transgender or gender-expansive person to be killed in the United States.
The name of a dead person was used in court papers, and the first news stories about him, including one from AL.com, gave him the wrong gender. The first story on AL.com was based on a police statement that said the victim was a man but didn’t say Thomas’ name.
A police spokeswoman on May 7 said that Thomas’s identity was not given to AL.com in the first story because the victim’s family had not yet been notified.
