África Parrilla García, a 25-Year-Old Trans Woman, Was Killed in Puerto Rico in February

Samantha Riedel
·3 min read

Antonio Cascio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Note: This story contains descriptions of fatal violence against a trans woman.

África Parrilla García, a transgender woman from Puerto Rico, was shot and killed in San Juan on February 2. She was 25 years old.

Few details about García’s life are publicly available, as initial Spanish-language reports identified her as a man and used her deadname. Some reports have also identified García by the first name Emma, including the Human Rights Campaign in a statement mourning her death this week. Them has contacted the HRC for more information, but the name África is used in a majority of statements from García’s friends and by LGBTQ+ journalists in Puerto Rico.

An unknown gunman shot García multiple times on Aurora Street in the capital city at around 1 a.m. on February 2, according to Puerto Rico’s largest newspaper El Nuevo Día. She is the first known trans woman to die by violence in Puerto Rico in 2024. Police have said they are investigating the killing as a possible hate crime, but have not made public statements about any suspects or arrests in the case.

Pedro Julio Serrano, an HIV activist and president of the Puerto Rican LGBTQ+ nonprofit Puerto Rico Para Todes, condemned the police response to García’s killing in comments to El Nuevo Día. “[The police] failed in their protocols. They should have said they murdered a person,” not a “man,” Serrano said, in comments originally published in Spanish. “That’s what the protocol says when you can't confirm the victim’s gender identity or expression [...] They must fulfill their obligation to investigate these cases with respect, empathy, and sensitivity.”

According to friends and community advocates who spoke to El Nuevo Día following her death, García had been engaged in survival sex work for the last two years. Puerto Rican trans artist LeQueen, a friend of García’s, told the newspaper she believed the danger involved with that work may have been one reason she was killed.

29-Year-Old Trans Woman Chanell Perez Ortiz Shot and Killed in Puerto Rico

Ortiz is at least the 13th trans person reported killed in the U.S. this year.

“A lot of trans women are on the streets and are made invisible because many people believe that their lives are worthless,” LeQueen explained, in Spanish. “They don’t give them the ‘spotlight’ that they deserve, and those men take advantage of that. They think, ‘if I kill her here, no one is going to care.’”

Anacaona Reyes, who said she met García while walking the streets of San Juan’s Santurce neighborhood, told the paper she felt “hopeless” after news broke of García’s death. “It was like they killed me or a sister,” Reyes said, describing the pain of losing her friend.

García is one of at least eight trans people who have been killed within the U.S. in 2024, based on the Human Rights Campaign’s running tally. (Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory for more than 125 years, and its residents are U.S. citizens. A narrow margin of Puerto Ricans are in favor of becoming the country’s 51st state.) Recent years have seen a wave of anti-trans violence in Puerto Rico; last year, 29-year-old Chanell Perez Ortiz was shot and killed in Carolina, just a few miles east of San Juan.

“I think this happened to all of us. There is one less,” Reyes told El Nuevo Día in February. “I have also given up a little on counting the trans people who are killed, who we lose, because it is very painful [...] I think there is a lack of that sensitivity and that intention to find the reasons why they kill us today in society.”

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Originally Appeared on them.