Transgender woman says she won’t be intimidated by threats
Angelina Bouros hopes state police will find the person responsible for mailing a threatening, obscenity-laced and handwritten letter to her home in October.
But this week, she decided to take matters into her own hands by going to the press. On Oct. 1, 2019, Bouros, a transgender woman, received the handwritten letter, which she said was the fourth “piece of hate mail” she’d gotten in the 10 years she’s owned her home on Dellay Avenue in Rosendale. Bouros said the three other notes were typewritten and used “lettering they glued to blank paper.”
In the Oct. 1 letter, the anonymous writer says he or she lives “way up the road, not in view” of Bouros’ home.
State police spokesman Trooper Steven Nevel confirmed in an email Tuesday that the threatening letter is “part of an ongoing investigation.”
Nevel declined to comment further other than to say Wednesday that state police “take every
thing seriously and this is being investigated.” He and Rosendale police did not respond to emailed questions about whether the letters are considered to have been sent by one individual, whether police are narrowing their search for a suspect or suspects, if residents of Bouros’ neighborhood have been interviewed or whether the letter is being investigated as a hate crime.
Bouros, 58, said both state and Rosendale police have interviewed her neighbors and “knocked on doors” as part of their investigations. She said she has installed surveillance cameras outside her home and has noticed increased Rosendale police patrols on her street since reporting the October letter to state police.
In the letter, the writer appeared annoyed that Bouros and about 250 volunteers painted her house in rainbow colors in September 2019. “Your house looks like s—t. No way I would help paint that dump,” it states.
The note also appears to take credit for the death of Bouros’ cat in June 2019. “You better watch your back you f-g. Your cat dying was only a warning. It will get worse in time when you are relaxed & think it is over, pow you are in for it & that ugly house too & those poor people next door to you when your house explodes,” it states.
In June 2019, Bouros found the remains of her cat, Rambo, in woods behind her home. She believed it had been slaughtered and immediately called the state police.
An investigation was conducted last year by state police and the Cornell University Animal Health Diagnostic Center on behalf of the Ulster County SPCA. The Cornell University report, forwarded to the Freeman on Sept. 11, 2019, by Gina Carbonari, the SPCA’s executive director, stated that “although the cat appeared, to the naked eye, to have been cleanly cut, forensic examination has shown that all tissues were jagged and torn, and this tearing was done after the cat was already deceased.”
“Based on the evidence from the forensic veterinarian, the Ulster County SPCA has closed its investigation into this case as animal cruelty,” Carbonari wrote in September.
In an email Tuesday, Carbonari said state police made her aware of the October letter to Bouros and “are investigating without our involvement.”
Asked whether she had reconsidered the cause of the cat’s death in light of the letter Bouros received, Carbonari said the Cornell pathology report “was conclusive in the cat’s cause of death.”
Bouros remains convinced Rambo’s death was not accidental.
In September, she decided to send a message to the angry neighbor by asking other neighbors and supporters to paint her house in rainbow colors.
Rainbow colors often are used to represent the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.
On Sept. 7, 2019, Bouros said, about 250 volunteers, many of them people she had never met before, gathered to help paint her house.
The letter writer “picked the wrong person to pick on because I will never back down. I will never allow a person like that to intimidate me,” she said Tuesday. “I feel the need to keep the heat up on this individual. … I’m hoping that they’ll really slip up and he can be caught.”
Last week, NowThis, a progressive online media outlet, produced and posted a video about Bouros’ situation. In it, Bouros says, “You’ve got to look people in the eye and say, ‘I exist. I’m a human being, just like you are. You know if I’m not important to you, that’s fine. I’m important to me. So if you think you’re going to intimidate me and instill fear in me, you picked on the wrong person.’”
In a 2019 report titled “A National Epidemic: Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence in the United States in 2019,” the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ rights organization, stated that, “In the seven years that the Human Rights Campaign has tracked antitransgender violence, an average of at least 22 transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been victims of fatal violence per year nationwide.
“We say ‘at least’ because the stories detailed in this report very likely undercount the number of transgender and gender-nonconforming people who were killed in the United States this year,” the report said.
Asked if the threat against her is frightening, Bouros said it is not.
“I’m not going to allow somebody to instill fear in me like that,” she said. “I’m not going to put my life on hold. … By doing what they’re doing, they’re bringing a lot of people together.”
Bouros said her actions are also meant as a message to other transgender people:
“I know a lot of trans people that would just buckle under, and part of the reason I’m doing what I’m doing is for them because I know that they won’t go places. They won’t travel by themselves. And even if they go, people are afraid. … I can’t and I won’t live my life like that. No matter what this person does, I will just be relentless. … And if I have to take this to the death, I’ll do it. That’s the way I feel. I can’t stand bullies.”
Bouros said she met on Wednesday with state police Investigator Matthew Bresnahan and his supervisor. Bouros said she came away from that meeting satisfied that police are doing all they can to crack the case.
She said she told Bresnahan that she went to the Freeman, hoping a story might bring her antagonist out of the shadows.
“If they can’t get results, well, then maybe I can,” Bouros said. “It’s not your house being threatened to be blown up. It was mine.
“Somebody knows who this is. Somebody knows.”