A Cook County jury found Tremon Hill, 25, not guilty of first-degree murder in the 2018 killing of Dejanay Stanton, a transgender woman found shot in a Bronzeville alley. The jury deliberated for several hours and asked about the possibility of a deadlock before returning its verdict, the Chicago Tribune reported. Hill is expected to be released on electronic monitoring because of a separate pending case, the Tribune said. The acquittal does not establish who killed Stanton.
The verdict turned on disputed phone evidence
Prosecutors’ case included phone records and messages that they said showed Hill and Stanton had been in contact and that their phones were near one another around the time of her death, according to the Tribune’s account. They also alleged that Hill, who was 17 at the time, met Stanton at a motel in July 2018 and later asked her to remove photos and messages because he feared their relationship would be discovered.
Hill’s attorneys argued that the state had not presented witnesses or physical evidence connecting him to the killing. The Tribune reported that the defense pointed to the absence of Hill’s fingerprints on Stanton’s car and his DNA on her body. Prosecutors countered that messages containing details of Hill’s life helped establish that the phone was his. These were competing claims presented at trial, as reported by the Tribune.
Some details remain inconsistent across reports
The accounts supplied for this story give different dates for Stanton’s killing. The Tribune’s trial report places the shooting on Aug. 30, 2018, in the 4000 block of South King Drive. A Chicago Sun-Times report published when Hill was charged described the slaying as occurring Aug. 13. The available reports do not resolve the discrepancy.
Stanton’s death also prompted calls for better protections for transgender people, particularly Black transgender women, the Tribune reported. At the time, Block Club Chicago reported that Stanton was at least the 17th transgender person murdered in the United States that year.
What hate-crime data can show
The material cited here does not provide an Illinois-specific count of reported anti-transgender hate crimes. The FBI cautions that its hate-crime statistics do not estimate data to account for missing submissions, so they reflect reported and classified incidents rather than all violence against transgender people.
