This week Racialicious posted a piece about a black trans woman who has been arrested and charged with 2nd degree murder after she and her friends were violently attacked by a group of white people who were yelling racist and transphobic epithets. A woman smashed a glass into CeCe’s face and, according to Racialicious,
A fight ensued between the adults and the young people after this initial attack and one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.
As if it were not sufficiently tragic that a group of young people were subjected to such severe violence and that Dean Schmitz lost his life, police arriving at the scene arrested CeCe, denied her adequate medical treatment, interrogated her for hours, and placed her in solitary confinement. In the aftermath of being attacked, she was not treated with care, but launched into another nightmare. The only person arrested that night, she has since been charged with two counts of 2nd degree murder. Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman has the power to drop these charges, a choice he made in multiple other clear instances of self-defense this year, but he has not yet done so.
CeCe’s story is a portrait of the United States Criminal Justice System. Her story is what is meant when we are told that transgender people, especially transgender women of color, experience disproportionate rates of police harassment, profiling, and abuse. She is living one of the stories rolled into statistics like: trans people are ten to fifteen times more likely to be incarcerated than cisgender (not transgender) people, or nearly half of African American transgender people have spent time in jail or prison.
Please take a moment to read the full Racialicious article here, and visit http://supportcece.wordpress.com/ to get updates on the case. To tell Michael Freeman you support dropping the charges against CeCe, call 612-348-5561 or email citizeninfo@co.hennepin.mn.us
