Students Walk Out of Oklahoma High School Where Nonbinary Student Was Beaten and Later Died

More than a dozen students have staged a walkout at the Oklahoma high school where a nonbinary student was beaten and later died

By Associated Press
Feb. 26, 2024, 

SUE BENEDICT
In this image provided Malia Pila, Nex Benedict poses outside the family's home in Owasso, Okla., in December 2023. Police in Oklahoma are investigating the death of Benedict, a 16-year-old student who died a day after an altercation in a high school bathroom that may have been prompted by bullying over gender identity. Neither police nor school officials have said what led to the fight. But the family of Benedict says there had been harassment because the teen was nonbinary. (Sue Benedict via AP)

OWASSO, Okla. (AP) — More than a dozen students walked out of class Monday at an Oklahoma high school where a 16-year-old nonbinary student was beaten inside a restroom earlier this month and died the following day.

Students and LGBTQ+ advocates held signs that read “You Are Loved” and “Protect Queer Kids” as they gathered at an intersection across from Owasso High School.

The students are demanding action against discrimination and bullying of transgender and gender nonconforming students after the death of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old student at the school who identified as nonbinary and used they/them pronouns. Benedict, who died the day after a fight with three girls inside a high school restroom, had been the target of bullying at the school, their family said.

“Students and families are out in force today having to demand the basics: to be safe from bullying and violence," the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD said in a statement. “It is appalling and shameful that Nex Benedict endured a year of anti-LGBTQ harassment, then a brutal beating in the school bathroom.”

The state medical examiner's office has not released the cause or manner of Benedict's death, but a police spokesperson has said preliminary results show the death was not the result of injuries suffered in the fight. Police are investigating the teen's death and will forward the findings of their investigation to the district attorney's office to determine what, if any, criminal charges might be filed.

Vigils honoring the teen have been held across Oklahoma and the nation after news of Benedict's death.

Deleted texts helped convince jurors man killed trans woman because of gender ID, foreperson says

AP |
Feb 27, 2024 

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — When jurors first began weighing the fate of a man charged with murdering the transgender woman he’d been seeing secretly, they had little problem concluding that he fired the gun, the jury foreperson said.HT 

The most difficult task was determining that he was driven by hate, as the Department of Justice alleged, Dee Elder, a transgender woman from Aiken, South Carolina, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
Hindustan Times - your fastest source for breaking news! Read now.

“Motive is just a harder thing to prove,” Elder said. “How do you look between someone’s ears?”

Elder reached out to the AP after she and 11 other jurors found Daqua Ritter guilty of shooting Dime Doe three times on Aug. 4, 2019, because of her gender identity, bringing to an end the first federal trial over a bias-motivated crime of that sort.

Familiar with the difficulties presented by society for transgender people, Elder, 41, said she was compelled to discuss the case given its historic nature.

“We are everywhere. If one of us goes down, there’ll be another one of us on the jury,” she said. “And we’ve always been here. We’re just now letting ourselves be known.”

To prove the hate crime element during the trial, the Department of Justice relied heavily on arguments that Ritter feared he'd be ridiculed if the relationship became public knowledge in the rural South Carolina community of Allendale.

Jurors quickly reached a consensus on the charge that Ritter obstructed justice by lying to investigators, Elder said, and they also felt comfortable concluding that Ritter was the one who killed Doe.

But Elder said that determining the reason for committing the crime is “what took four hours.”

Hundreds of text messages between the pair, later obtained by the FBI, proved key to the conviction, she said. In many of them, Ritter repeatedly reminded Doe to delete their communications from her phone. The majority of the texts sent in the month before the killing were deleted, according to one FBI official’s testimony. Ritter often communicated through an app called TextNow, which provides users with a phone number that is different from their cellphone number, officials testified.

In a July 29, 2019, message, Doe complained that Ritter never reciprocated the generosity she showed him through such favors as driving him around town. Ritter replied that he thought they had an understanding that she didn't need the “extra stuff.”

In another text, Ritter — who visited Allendale from New York in the summers — complained that his main girlfriend at the time, Delasia Green, had insulted him with a homophobic slur after learning of his affair with Doe. At trial, Green testified that Ritter told her not to question his sexuality when she confronted him. Doe told Ritter in a message on July 31 that she felt used and that he never should have let Green find out about them.

The exchanges showed that Ritter “was using this poor girl” and “taking advantage” of their connection, Elder said.

"When she had the nerve to be happy about it and wanted to share it with her friends, he got nervous and scared that others would find out, and put an end to it," she added.

Elder said she hadn't even heard about Doe's death until jury selection, something that surprised her as a regular consumer of transgender-related news. Elder believes she was the only transgender person on the panel.

Without going into detail, she added that she understands firsthand the real-world harm caused by the stigma still attached to being a transgender person.

“In my personal experience, it can be dangerous for transgender women to date," Elder said.

—-

Pollard is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.