Two men have been detained by police in connection with the killing of two transgender women in Puerto Rico last month.
The bodies of Layla Peláez, 21, and Serena Angelique Velázquez, 32, were found inside a charred Hyundai Elantra on April 22 in the city of Humacao, on Puerto Rico’s eastern coast.
On Thursday, local authorities announced that 21-year-old Juan Carlos Pagán Bonilla, and 19-year-old Sean Díaz de León had been taken into custody.
Capt. Teddy Morales, the chief of criminal investigations for the police in Humacao, said that police has classified the killings as hate crimes.
One of the suspects confessed that the slayings were “revenge,” according to local newspaper Primera Hora.
They were socializing with the victims, “and once they found out they were transgender women, they decided to kill them,” he said.
An autopsy to determine how exactly the women were killed is still pending.
The case was handed over to FBI on Thursday, the Latin news site The Americano reported.
According to a GoFundMe page to pay for the funeral cost of Peláez, she was a good friend of Velázquez.
The two were visiting Puerto Rico and planned to fly back to their homes in New York City at the end of the month. Velázquez lived in Queens and Peláez in the Bronx.
Five of the nine U.S. murders of transgender and gender non-conforming people in 2020 have occurred in Puerto Rico, which to local LGBTQ activist Pedro Julio Serrano constitutes “without a doubt an epidemic” of anti-LGBTQ violence.
Last week the Human Rights Campaign reported the death of another transgender woman in Puerto Rico. Penélope Díaz Ramírez, 31, was killed April 13 at the Bayamon correctional complex.
Earlier this year, Neulisa Luciano Ruiz was fatally shot in Toa Baja, on Feb. 24. About a week later, Yampi Méndez Arocho, a transgender man, was killed after being assaulted.
“Never in my career have I seen so many reports of deaths of our transgender and gender non-conforming community in such a short time in one location,” Tori Cooper, HRC director of community engagement for the transgender justice initiative, said in a statement.
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