WASHINGTON — We don't know whether Ashanti Carmon knew exactly what was coming. But we know she was afraid.
In the early-morning hours of March 30, 2019, Carmon, 27, and her friend Zoe Spears, 23, were working Eastern Avenue, a well-known sex-work stroll that straddles the border between Maryland and Washington, DC, not far from the National Arboretum. They had arranged for a date that would pay them $800 each, but toward the end, Carmon was anxious to leave. She was "stressed out in the face," Spears later told the police. She asked their date to hurry up and quit the chitchat so everyone could be on their way.
Finally, the date peeled off in a blue car. But another man in a white car pulled up to the women, who were just a few blocks from Spears' apartment.
This man was angry, Spears said to the police. "Bitch, I thought I told you," he told Carmon. "You weren't leaving out of this."
Carmon, however, told him she wanted out. She was engaged to a man who loved her, Philip Williams, and referred to herself as "Mrs. Ashanti Williams" on Facebook. She had at least one other job, at a local Dunkin', that, while less lucrative than sex work, came with far less stress; she was on the verge of becoming a manager there.
The man asked Carmon whether she wanted to "take this route," Spears recounted, but Carmon held her ground.
He pulled out a gun and shot her three times. When she collapsed on the ground, he fired off an extra two.
He pulled Spears, screaming and crying, into his car. He put a plastic shopping bag down so her dress, stained with Carmon's blood, wouldn't touch the seat cushion. "Let's go," he said, "or you're going to catch the same fate."
In May, Spears met with the police to share her version of what happened. She told them about the man, including the color of the sweatshirt he wore that night, and a phone number she believed was connected to him.
Within weeks of the interview, she, too, was fatally shot, by a man in a silver Dodge Caravan. Her body was found just two blocks from where Carmon died.
'Do not go on Eastern Avenue'
The stories of these two women, both of whom were transgender, echo across "Deaths in the Family," Insider's investigation into fatal violence against transgender and gender nonconforming people from 2017 to 2021. Like Carmon and Spears, nearly two-thirds of the 175 transgender people killed over those five years were Black women. We found evidence that at least 33 of those killed had engaged in sex work; at least 20 of them were killed on the job. Like Spears, at least 20 of those killed were or had previously been homeless.
Because many of Insider's records requests were denied or heavily redacted, the circumstances surrounding 79 of the killings remain unknown, so these numbers are almost certainly an undercount. Still, economic vulnerability was a reality for dozens and inevitably increased their exposure to violence.
For Spears and Carmon, their vulnerability was intertwined with Eastern Avenue. And like many American thoroughfares paved through historically Black communities, Eastern Avenue was shaped by segregation.
Nearby, in northeastern Washington, DC, racial covenants legally prohibited Black Americans from owning homes until 1948. In the ensuing years, as Black people began moving into the area, white flight took hold, and economic disinvestment further transformed the area. In pop culture, Eastern Avenue has been a muse of crime fiction. "The Big Blowdown," a novel set in the 1940s by the "Wire" writer and producer George Pelecanos, uses the boulevard to illustrate the seediness of Washington's outskirts, describing "gambling joints" and an "Eastern cat-house."
Among sex workers in the area, including transgender sex workers, Eastern Avenue is known as one of a few strips where dates can dependably be found — but at great cost.
"It's a very violent part of the city," Charmaine Eccles said over dinner at a Thai restaurant in the Northeast, about two miles from where Spears was killed. Eccles, a transgender advocate, was born and raised in the District and knew both Spears and Carmon. She vividly remembers when Eastern's low-lit streets, once populated by cisgender sex workers, eventually became a place for transgender women. "Some of the girls infiltrated the neighborhood," she said, "and next thing you know, it was recognized as a stroll for trans people."
"Every day we go out on the streets, we are taking a risk," Charmaine Eccles said. "Many jobs were not available to us," she continued, citing discrimination "at the door."
"We had to figure out a way out of no way," she added, "just to survive, just to eat, just to pay for a hotel room."
Shareese Mone, a transgender advocate who works with Honoring Individual Power and Strength, said sex work was too often "survival work" for transgender women, especially for those, like Carmon, who are rejected by their families because of their identity. A lack of proper protections, and the reality of living in a culture where transphobia is common, often push transgender women like Carmon and Spears into marginal economies.
"Being out on that stroll is a lot of survival work," Mone said. "Understanding that we are out there to make a living, to eat, so that we can lay for the night. You know, everybody doesn't have that family support that you can go back home to or that ability to come up out of drag and then go back home as a boy or as a girl."
Walker said job training — like the kind she received through the Department of Health, which helps LGBTQ people enter the public-health field — was a helpful resource for transgender women. But she said that having safe, stable and affordable housing was a necessary prerequisite. "If you don't have housing," she said, it's difficult to shower and "to get dressed for interviews."
"We not only need to work in DC," Mone said. "We need to work everywhere. We need to understand how this community needs to be accepted."
'A hard pill to swallow'
Over dinner in September, Eccles told the story of a scar she got on Eastern Avenue, on a "cold as shit" February night in 2016.
A man walked past her on the street. "Then, seconds later, I felt something on my back," she said. He told her to "give me everything you have" before trying to grab her purse. She tussled with him and fell onto the concrete. "Next thing you know," she said, "something was on my leg and he shot me. It was a direct hit on my femur." She remembered the man snarling, with his gun pointed at her head, "You dumbass bitch, I could kill you," before taking off with her purse. She was a block away from where Carmon was killed three years later.
She said she lay alone on Eastern Avenue as rain started to pour. Unable to get up, she called 911, and, drawing from her past experience working as a 911 transcriber and trainer, she carefully guided a dispatcher how to find her as quickly as possible. She said the surgery lasted nine hours. Had the emergency crew not arrived quickly, she fears, she might have died.
Today, she has a metal rod in her leg. She said it improved her posture. Standing at 6-foot-7, she beamed when explaining that the hunk of metal made her even taller.
After that night, she stopped working on Eastern Avenue. She wants transgender women to get out — off of the Avenue and out of sex work altogether.
"It's kind of like an automatic learned behavior," she said. "Like you transition to being Black in the city and one of the first things that you are told is: 'OK girl, go and get some money. Go trick, go post an ad.'"
Though Eccles stressed that "there's nothing wrong with prostitution," she believes other, safer opportunities are available.
She found work with Casa Ruby, the trans-led shelter. In 2021, she received a DC Black Pride award for her activism and advocacy in the transgender community. Accolades, however, don't pay the bills. A year later, Eccles said, she was fired from Casa Ruby. Soon after, the organization lost an $800,000 contract with the city.
One of the few trans-led resources to help sex workers find a path to stability had shuttered amid reported mismanagement and a lack of funds.
Her recent stretch of unemployment was punctuated by the loss of her brother. After she struggled to obtain food stamps, she returned to K Street to fill her fridge. After her first interview with Insider, a date assaulted and robbed her in her home.
Some weeks later, Insider spoke with Eccles again to check in, and to ask what she appreciated most on the other side of surviving those near-fatal encounters. "Nature," she replied.
"I appreciate air," she said. "I appreciate water. I appreciate the trees, the grass, the ants, the bugs."
"It's free," she said. "I mean, who knows? Monday, they might start putting a price on air. But, for right now, that's what I love. I appreciate the little things in life. Life goes on. It does, even though it's a hard pill to swallow. But it does."
- Read more from Insider's "Deaths in the Family" project on transgender homicides:
- Introduction and key findings
- Killings driven by transphobia
- Law enforcement killings
