LAPD searching for leads in suspected sex worker slayings, including that of trans woman

LAPD homicide detectives continued their search for leads in two fatal shootings this week of women who police say were engaged in sex work. The body of one victim, a transgender woman, was dumped onto a South Los Angeles street from a car that was seen fleeing the area.

Police on Thursday said they had not made any arrests in either homicide.

The most recent shooting happened early Thursday near the corner of West 70th and Figueroa streets, and the earlier incident occurred late Tuesday on Hoover Street, a block west of the Figueroa Corridor, an area of South L.A. with a long history of sex trade activity.

Neither victim has been publicly identified.

Police said officers found the first victim sometime after 8 p.m. after responding to reports of a body lying on Hoover, between Slauson Avenue and West 59th Street. Officers found the woman’s broken fingernail and a can of Mace nearby, suggesting a struggle occurred.

The Times reviewed surveillance camera video from a sports bar across the street from where the body was found. The footage, which is obscured by the glare of a streetlight, shows a light-colored sedan with its lights off next to the parking lot of a high school. At some point, a figure emerges and appears to drag the body onto the pavement, before getting back into the car and driving off. The body lay in the road for several minutes in view of passing motorists, before the first police squads arrived on scene.

The victim was apparently shot in the car after a sexual encounter that went wrong for reasons that are unclear, police said, without elaborating. Police say that sex workers who work in the area are usually picked up by customers, who drive to one of the motels on that stretch of Figueroa or park on a nearby street. Occasionally, these encounters turn violent for workers, police said, at the hands of customers or pimps.

Jen Elizabeth, director of street engagement for the nonprofit the Sidewalk Project, cautioned against assuming that transgender people who are provocatively dressed are sex workers. At the same time, she said, social attitudes about those who engage in the work — whether by choice or out of fear or desperation — have normalized acts of violence.

Transgender people are especially vulnerable, Elizabeth said, describing cases of customers who have lashed out at a transgender worker after an encounter because they are wrestling with their own sexuality. “In that shame comes the rage, and they’re pissed off, and then they look at this woman and feel as though it’s their fault that they’re gay,” Elizabeth said, referring to what she calls a “false narrative” that perpetuates such violence.

The second incident on Figueroa happened sometime after 4 a.m. Thursday when police found a young woman who had been shot in the back of the head. She is believed to have been in her 20s. As with the other slaying, the victim was shot with a 9-millimeter firearm, police said.

Detectives received a general description of the vehicle suspected to be linked to that killing and were piecing together other evidence, but have also asked for the public’s help in finding the shooter.

The shootings follow a homicide last month on what police say is another “prostitution track” on Western Avenue, in which a 25-year-old woman was killed when someone in a passing vehicle sprayed the corner she was standing on with gunfire. A 60-year-old unhoused man who was nearby was also struck, but survived.