This article contains descriptions of fatal violence against a transgender woman.
Sasha Williams, a multiracial transgender woman from North Carolina, was killed in Las Vegas on January 26. She was 36 years old.
Although Williams’ death was known to some in her community, her identity was not initially made public. Media reports in January noted only that a woman had been stabbed on the morning of the 26th in the street near Palos Verdes Street and Twain Avenue, not far from the Las Vegas Strip.
Witnesses who spoke to police said they saw Williams in an argument with a man directly before the stabbing took place. They then directed the police to an apartment where they believed the suspect fled. Authorities subsequently arrested 20-year-old Hassan Malik Howard, charging him with open murder with a deadly weapon. Howard was being held in Clark County jail without bond as of this week, according to prisoner records reviewed by Them. No motive in Williams’ murder has yet been confirmed.
Williams’ identity was brought to wider public knowledge via an article last week in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and through additional reporting by Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents. According to her aunt, Tina Thornton, Williams was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, by a single father and her aunts. Williams came out as trans in her teens, and found acceptance after several years of tension with her father, Thornton told the Review-Journal. She enrolled in the Job Corps, obtained her GED, and eventually became certified as a hair, nails, and makeup artist.
Although her mental health was severely impacted after she was incarcerated in a men’s prison, Williams later moved to Las Vegas in 2021 to pursue her dream of being a performer. There, she met fellow artist David Leach through the local ballroom community, and the two became close friends (and fierce competitors). Williams was known to sew her own clothes, and even reupholstered her car’s interior in cheetah print, her favorite pattern, Leach recalled. She often sent delivery orders to both Leach and Thornton when they were dealing with medical problems, and Leach fondly remembered her “heart of gold.”
But Williams still struggled with her mental health, and reportedly entered a depressive spiral after losing her dogs and her home months before her death. According to Thornton and Leach, she retreated into drug use and resisted help from others. One month before her death, Leach reported her as a missing person — a report which Williams resented, he said, but which helped officials identify Williams after her death.
“She died in cold blood, in broad daylight, in the middle of the street in Las Vegas,” Leach mourned in the Review-Journal. “I just have this big question mark that just lays in my head all the time on that — what happened? [….] We just don’t know; I just want to know.”
Williams is one of at least 13 trans people who have died violently in the U.S. this year so far, according to an ongoing estimate from Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents. Her death came less than a month after the killing of self-described “transient fashion model” Kitty Monroe in Arizona on New Year’s Day.
“My heart breaks for Sasha’s family, her friends, and for her community — it is clear Sasha was fighting hard to better herself against long odds,” wrote Tori Cooper of the Human Rights Campaign’s Transgender Justice Initiative in a statement released this week. “Yet again, we find ourselves mourning a life that ended far too soon.”
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