Black transgender Air Force veteran Vanity Williams shot to death in Houston

Vanity Williams, a 34-year-old Black transgender woman who had recently started nursing school, was shot to death August 3 in the lobby of her apartment building in Houston.

Williams’s friends are remembering her fondly, and they say they don’t know why anyone would want to kill her. But Tristian Sanders, 26, a man who police say was known to Williams, was arrested a week later and charged with murder. She was found in the lobby suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.

Williams had entered nursing school with the goal of opening a medical spa. She was an Air Force veteran who was dedicated to uplifting the Black community and women.

“She created and made a safe space for everybody, so to think that someone would want to hurt her and have a justified reason is something I cannot fathom,” her friend Hope Giselle told Houston’s ABC affiliate.

Williams had a great sense of humor and “had a really dope personality outside of just being able to have really educated conversation and speak truth to power about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a woman of color,” Giselle added.

Williams was a close friend of Johnáe Wright, a community adviser to the Human Rights Campaign’s NextLevel program. “Words can't explain the pain that cuts deep into my soul,” Wright said in an HRC press release. “She was my friend, my sister, my heart. Never knew your last text to me would be ‘WYD.’ I will always hold a special place in my heart for you and continue to fight for you and our community.”

“On social media, where she also went by Chanel Williams, friends and loved ones reminisced about her ‘resilient soul, brilliant mind, and beautiful spirit,’ and her love of makeup, nail art, and fashion,” the HRC release notes.

Sanders was arrested by a SWAT team in Luling, La., and jailed in Louisiana before being extradited to Houston. Houston police and other law enforcement agencies that were involved wouldn’t provide information on his relationship with Williams, but her friends told the ABC station they knew each other.

“Across social media, Vanity’s friends echoed a quote she often said: ‘I don’t fear death! I fear injustice!’” Tori Cooper, director of community engagement for HRC’s Transgender Justice Initiative, said in the organization’s release. “Vanity spent her life serving her country and community, and she should still be here today, continuing to pursue her own dreams. Instead, in another senseless death, she was let down by the same forces that continue to plague our community — transphobia, misogynoir, and gun violence. I grieve alongside her loved ones, including those in our NextLevel community.”

A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to assist Williams’s family with funeral expenses.