Trans woman Andrea Doria Dos Passos beaten to death in Miami Beach; arrest made

Andrea Doria Dos Passos, 37, a transgender woman who was experiencing homelessness, was found beaten to death Tuesday outside the Miami City Ballet building in Miami Beach, Fla.

The attack on Dos Passos was caught on surveillance video and led to the arrest of Gregory Fitzgerald Gibert, 53, who is charged with second-degree murder, the Miami Herald reports.

An employee of the ballet company found Dos Passos lying on the ground about 7 a.m. Tuesday. The worker initially thought she was sleeping, then saw that she was surrounded by blood and called police.

Surveillance video showed a man beating her with a pipe, and police matched the description to Gibert, who was on probation on charges including aggravated assault with no intent to kill and attempted robbery with a weapon. He had been sentenced to four years of probation on the charges just six days before the attack on Dos Passos.

Police said they do not consider Dos Passos’s death a hate crime, but some are calling for prosecutors to add a hate-crime enhancement to the charges against Gibert. “We have no evidence indicating that she was targeted solely based on her sexuality and/or gender,” Officer Christopher Bess, a police spokesman, told the Herald.

However, the Miami-Dade County state attorney’s office’s hate crimes unit is reviewing the case “to see if Florida’s hate-crime enhancement is applicable to the specific situation,” as it does with every case, a spokesperson said in a statement to the paper.

Flamingo Democrats, the Miami-Dade chapter of the Florida LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus, urged prosecutors to add the hate-crime enhancement. “The safety of all residents of Miami Beach and Miami-Dade County should be of the utmost importance, especially those in marginalized communities such as our transgender community,” said a statement from the group, the Herald reports.

Dos Passos’s stepfather, Victor Van Gilst, mourned her in an interview with Miami’s CBS affiliate. “She had no chance to defend herself whatsoever,” he said. “I don’t know if this was a hate crime since she was transgender or if she had some sort of interaction with this person because he might have been homeless as well. The detective could not say if she was attacked because she was transgender. She has been struggling with mental health issues for a long time, going back to when she was in her early 20s. We did everything we could to help her. My wife is devastated. For her, this is like a nightmare that turned in to reality. Andrea moved around a lot and even lived in California for a while. She was sadly homeless. I feel the system let her down. She was a good person.”