2 • BAY AREA REPORTER •
<< Community News
April 21-27, 2011
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Rick Gerharter
Support for trans assault victim N
early 300 transgender people and allies attended an April 15 rally at 16th and Mission streets to support Mia Tu Mutch, left, a victim of recent street violence. Tu Mutch, 20, as she is known, was physically assaulted near the 16th Street BART station on April 1; she also said that she was sexually assaulted.
Two men Lionel Jackson, 32, and Maurice Perry, 37, have pleaded not guilty to felony assault charges. No one has been charged with sexual assault. District Attorney George Gascón, in background, also attended the Friday rally. The sign says, “Open your arms to fly with Ella.”
Shooting victim recalls Oakland incident by Seth Hemmelgarn
R
omel Reid was drinking with two friends a couple months ago near 14th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland when, he said recently, two “boys” walked up and asked if he and his friends wanted to buy marijuana. Reid, who’s 21 and lives in Fremont, said he and his friends declined. But the offer – around 1 a.m. on February 24 – was just the beginning of an incident that was about to go terribly wrong.
One of the men who had approached pulled out a gun, put it to one of Reid’s friend’s neck, and said, “Give me everything you have right now,” said Reid. Reid and his friends ran away, but the ground was slippery, and Reid, who said he was drunk and wearing sandals, slipped and fell into some bushes. As he tried to get up, one of the men grabbed Reid’s purse and demanded that Reid hand it over. (Reid, who sometimes dresses in drag and goes by the name Jakara, was wearing sandals, black leather leggings, a black T-shirt, and a black leather jacket at the time of the incident). “If I would have been sober, I would have just given him the purse,” said Reid, but “I was like, ‘Give me my fucking purse.’” The man said, “Bitch, I’m not playing with you,” put the gun to Reid’s face, and shot him, said Reid. “As soon as he shot me, it was total shock,” he said. He said his ears rang and he couldn’t see anything, and he fell to the ground. Once he realized he’d been shot, he started screaming for help, he said. Blood came out of his mouth and he was spitting out teeth, he said. “It hurt so bad it was numb,” in his jaw, nose, and the side of his face, said Reid. He said both men ran off, dropping Reid’s purse. Soon after, a car zoomed around the corner and a man got out, grabbed the purse, and got back in the car, which quickly took off again. Reid said that as he screamed for help, “One of the girls out there, I guess she heard me screaming. I saw her running in the middle of the street. She was like, ‘Sister, sister, Oh my God, what happened?’” Police soon arrived, followed by an ambulance. Reid said that as he was placed inside the ambulance, he was in a great deal of pain and wanted to sleep. “I was telling the ambulance people, ‘Just let me close my eyes. Let me go to sleep,’” Reid recalled. But they kept talking to him and wouldn’t let him drift off – “I guess they don’t want you to die,” he said. He said he was hospitalized for five or six days. The bullet had pierced Reid’s throat, and then gone to his back, where it’s still lodged in his spine. He said hospital staff told him they couldn’t remove it. “I’d end up paralyzed if something went wrong,” he said.
Romel Reid, in a photo from his Facebook page, survived a recent shooting in Oakland.
Reid, who also has a scar on his left cheekbone and numbness along his neck, acknowledged the unlikelihood of surviving such an incident. “That bullet could’ve easily gone to my brain,” he said. “So many things could have been wrong. For me to just walk away from it ... I feel so blessed. It really is a miracle.” Reid said he wouldn’t be able to recognize the two men who had approached him. He said they were dressed in black. The man with the gun had dreadlocks hanging out of a beanie, he said. He was also uncertain about the car. He’d thought it was silver, but the woman who had called the police told him it was gold, he said. Oakland police spokeswoman Officer Holly Joshi said the only description she could offer was that one suspect was black and between 20 and 30 years old. She also said that nobody else was injured in the incident. Cynthia P. Perkins, assistant to the director at the Oakland Police Department, said in an email on Tuesday, April 19, “There have been no arrests or developed leads in this case.” Tiffany Woods, who works for TransVision, a program of Fremont’s Tri-City Health Center, has done outreach work in the area where Reid was shot. The area’s been known to be frequented by transgender sex workers. Woods said the shooting wasn’t the first violent incident there. However, she said, what happened to Reid was “new,” and that the violence hadn’t previously “gotten down to that level.”▼