LAPD seeking leads in two fatal shootings

The slain women, one of whom was transgender, were sex workers, officers say.

LAPD homicide detectives are searching for leads in two fatal shootings this week of women who they say were engaged in sex work. The body of one victim, a transgender woman, was dumped onto a South Los Angeles street from a car that was seen fleeing the area.

Police on Thursday said they had made no arrests in either homicide.

The first shooting occurred Tuesday on Hoover Street, a block west of the Figueroa Corridor, an area of South L.A. with a history of sex trade activity.

The Los Angeles Police Department said officers found the victim after 8 p.m., responding to reports of a body on Hoover between Slauson Avenue and West 59th Street. Officers found a broken fingernail and a can of Mace nearby, suggesting that a struggle had occurred.

The second shooting occurred early Thursday near the corner of West 70th and Figueroa.

Neither victim has been publicly identified.

The Times reviewed surveillance camera video from a sports bar across the street from where the first body was found. The footage, which is obscured by the glare of a streetlight, shows a light-colored sedan with its lights off next to the parking lot of a high school. A figure emerges and appears to drag the body onto the pavement before getting back into the car and driving off. The body lies in the road for several minutes, in view of passing motorists, before the first officers arrive.

The victim was apparently shot in the car after a sexual encounter, police said, without elaborating. Police say sex workers in the area are usually picked up by customers and driven to one of several motels on Figueroa, or they park on a nearby street. Occasionally, the encounters turn violent for the workers, police said, at the hands of customers or pimps.

In the second incident, police found a young woman after 4 a.m. Thursday who had been shot in the back of the head.

She is believed to have been in her 20s. As with the other slaying, the victim was shot with a 9-millimeter firearm, police said. Detectives received a general description of the vehicle believed to be linked to that killing and have asked for the public’s help in finding the shooter.

Jen Elizabeth, director of street engagement for the

nonprofit Sidewalk Project, cautioned against assuming that transgender people who are provocatively dressed are sex workers. At the same time, she said, social attitudes about those who engage in the work — by choice or out of fear or desperation — have normalized acts of violence against them.

Elizabeth described cases of customers who are wrestling with their own sexuality lashing out at a transgender worker after an encounter.

“In that shame comes the rage, and they’re pissed off, and then they look at this woman and feel as though it’s their fault that they’re gay,” Elizabeth said.

The shootings follow a homicide last month on what police say is another “prostitution track” on Western Avenue, in which a 25-year-old woman was killed when someone shot from a passing vehicle to the corner on which she was standing. A 60-year-old homeless man who was nearby was also struck, but he survived.