Trans woman killed in Honduras months after deportation from U.S.: reports
A transgender woman who was deported from the U.S. in July was fatally shot in her native Honduras this week, according to local reports.
Melissa Nuñez, 42, was killed Tuesday night in Morocelí, a municipality in eastern Honduras located about 40 miles east of the capital Tegucigalpa.
She was shot by a group of “hooded individuals” as she was leaving home, according to Reporter Sin Medo, a local media nonprofit that focuses on issues affecting minorities.
Nuñez, a popular TikTok user with more than 20,000 followers, was living in Honduras at the time. She previously lived in Miami, Fla.
She’d traveled home in December 2021, but when she returned to Miami, in July 2022, she was deported back to Honduras. That’s according to Indyra Mendoza, general coordinator of Cattrachas, a Tegucigalpa-based lesbian feminist organization.
Nuñez’s death marked the 34th killing of a member of the LGBTQ community in the Central American nation of 9.9 million people so far this year, Cattrachas said.
At least 434 LGBTQ individuals have been killed in the country since 2009. Of those, 131 were transgender people, according to the organization.
According to Mendoza, initial investigations indicate that Nuñez was killed by two shots to the head.
Nuñez was described by a friend in a Facebook post as a “very talented woman” who was “so full of life and energy that nothing was complicated for her.”
“There are no words to describe the sadness of seeing you leave this world so soon,” another friend wrote, calling her “a great woman, a great friend, a tremendous partner in the fight, an excellent human being with a great capacity to love both family and neighbor.”
