Local
Transgender woman stabbed repeatedly in D.C. attack
Police refuse to confirm reports of arrest of suspect
Bree Wallace (Photo courtesy of Ruby Corado.)
A police report, which lists the incident as an assault with intent to kill, says the stabbing took place at 3038 Stanton Road, S.E. It says the victim, Bree Wallace, managed to run several blocks to the apartment building where she lives on the 2400 block of 15th Place, S.E., before collapsing on the street.
The report says Wallace was taken to Prince George’s Hospital Center in nearby Cheverly, Md., where she was being treated for multiple stab wounds to the back and chest and severe lacerations to both of her hands.
“I don’t know why he did it,” Wallace told the Washington Blade in a phone interview on Sunday from her hospital bed. “He didn’t say anything,” she said in recounting how the incident took place after she recently met the attacker in the neighborhood near where she lives.
“The investigation has revealed that this assault with intent to kill was neither random nor a hate crime,” police spokesperson Gwendolyn Crump told the Blade in an e-mail.
But Crump and other police officials have declined to confirm Wallace’s assertion that police told her father that they arrested a suspect in the case late Friday or early Saturday.
“They told my dad,” said Wallace, in recounting to the Blade that a police investigator informed her father that an arrest had been made.
Trans activists Earline Budd and Ruby Corado, who know Wallace, said she told them she and the attacker had known each other casually prior to the attack. Corado said Wallace told her the attacker sent her a text message asking to meet up with her at the location where the stabbing occurred.
Corado told the Blade that Wallace informed her that at some point she declined the man’s request that the two become romantically or sexually involved. Corado said Wallace was a client at Casa Ruby, an LGBT community center with outreach to the Latino and trans communities for which Corado serves as director.
Wallace was also among 12 contestants chosen as a trans “calendar girl” in a fundraising contest sponsored by Casa Ruby as part of a Casa Ruby program to help train clients as makeup artists, Corado said.
Budd said the victim had also been one of her clients at Transgender Health Empowerment, a trans advocacy and services organization that recently has curtailed its operations due to financial problems.
“Complainant 1 [the victim] stated that she had met with Suspect 1 at the event location to buy a cigarette,” the police report says. “According to Complainant 1, Suspect 1 then suddenly started to stab Complainant 1 for unknown reasons,” the report says.
Budd and Corado said Wallace also informed them that police told her father that the suspect had been arrested and was expected to appear for a presentment or arraignment at D.C. Superior Court on Saturday during the court’s weekend proceedings.
“She knows who this guy is and she told police who he is,” Budd told the Blade. “I’m puzzled over why the police won’t confirm whether they made this arrest or not.”
Crump didn’t respond to a Blade inquiry about whether an arrest had been made.
Sgt. Matt Mahl, supervisor of the police Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit, said the unit had been briefed on the incident but said he wasn’t authorized to comment further. He said the incident was still under investigation.
Budd expressed concern that police officials had not issued a public announcement about the incident over the weekend to alert the media and the community that a trans person had been attacked in what Budd called another in a string of violent anti-trans attacks that have occurred in the city over the past several years.
“I just want to make sure that it gets out there, that this attack happened and how brutal it was,” Budd said. “And also the message needs to be sent that transgender folks need to be very, very cautious in terms of their surroundings, who they are talking to and especially in the nighttime hours.”
Budd and Corado said Wallace told them doctors informed her that she had been stabbed about 40 times.
D.C. property records show that the unoccupied house where the stabbing took place was sold for $100,000 in January to a company called the Kamyab Group based in Fredericksburg, Va.
Wallace said she and the attacker entered the house through a door that was detached from its hinges.
District of Columbia
D.C. Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs moving to new location
LGBTQ community center also set to leave Reeves Center
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, which is currently located at the city’s Reeves Center municipal building at 14th and U Street, N.W., was scheduled to move during the week of Dec. 9 to a new location at 899 North Capitol St., N.E., according to Japer Bowles, the office’s director.
Bowles said the LGBTQ Affairs office will be located on the seventh floor of the privately owned office building in which the city has rented space for several other city agencies, including the D.C. Department of Health.
The move comes about amid longstanding plans to demolish the Reeves Center and replace it with a redevelopment project that will include a mix of housing, office space, a hotel, and retail stores along with a public plaza and a 200-seat amphitheater.
The D.C. LGBTQ+ Community Center, which has been located in the Reeves Center for about 10 years, also expects to be moving out of the building in the spring of 2025, said Kimberley Bush, the LGBTQ center’s executive director.
Bush said the LGBTQ center looks forward to moving into its new, larger space in a building at 1827 Wiltberger St., N.W. in the city’s Shaw neighborhood, which is located one block away from the Shaw-Howard University Metro station.
The LGBTQ center entered a joint lease to rent space in the Wiltberger Street building with the Capital Pride Alliance, the group that organizes most of D.C.’s LGBTQ Pride events, including the upcoming World Pride 2025 events set to take place in D.C. May 17-June 8.
In response to a request by Bowser, the D.C. Council earlier this year approved $1 million in funding for fiscal year 2025 to support the build-out and construction of the LGBTQ Center’s space in the Wiltberger Street’s converted warehouse building.
But shortly after the Council approved that funding, the D.C. Center and Capital Pride Alliance announced the launch of a fundraising campaign called “Welcome Home – Building Together, Thriving Together” to raise an additional $1.5 million needed to complete the renovation of the new building.
“This endeavor is more than just the construction of a building; it represents a commitment to carve out a generous 7,000 square feet of space devoted to nurturing unity, empowerment, and support across the LGBTQ+ spectrum,” a statement announcing the fundraising campaign says.
District of Columbia
D.C. LGBTQ community to gather for post-election dialogue
Dec. 12 event to address federal workers’ rights, immigration, more
Several leading LGBTQ organizations in D.C. are coming together to make sense of the recent election and to discuss the future of advocacy and resilience as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office.
With Republicans in firm control of the federal government after winning majorities in the House and Senate, many are concerned about attacks on the LGBTQ community, including Trump’s pledge to ban trans people from serving in the military. In addition, many LGBTQ federal workers have expressed concerns about being targeted for reassignment or termination, as outlined in Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term.
In response, D.C.’s LGBTQ community is coming together for an event on Thursday, Dec. 12, 6:30-8 p.m. at the Eaton Hotel (1201 K. St., N.W.) featuring an array of speakers who will address issues, including: anticipated policy shifts; community resilience strategies; legal rights; immigration advocacy; and federal workers’ rights.
The event, titled, “Charting Our Future: LGBTQ+ Advocacy & Resilience in a Changing Landscape” is free; visit washingtonblade.com/future to RSVP.
The event is being hosted by the Washington Blade and includes community partners: the DC LGBTQ+ Budget Coalition, HME Consulting & Advocacy, Eaton DC, DC LGBTQ+ Community Center, Capital Pride Alliance, and the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs. Heidi Ellis of the DC LGBTQ+ Budget Coalition will moderate. A list of speakers will be released later this week.
District of Columbia
Casa Ruby receiver files for bankruptcy
Jan. 21 deadline set for creditors, former employees to apply for reimbursement
In a little-noticed development, the Wanda Alston Foundation, which assumed control over the operations of the D.C. LGBTQ community services group Casa Ruby in August 2022 under a court-appointed receivership role, filed a petition on Aug. 27 of this year to place Casa Ruby in bankruptcy.
The petition, filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Columbia, says Casa Ruby has estimated liabilities to at least 50 creditors of more than $1 million and estimated assets of between $0 and $50,000.
Nick Harrison, an attorney representing the Wanda Alston Foundation, which provides housing services to homeless LGBTQ youth, said Casa Ruby currently has no known financial assets, including cash.
He said the bankruptcy petition’s estimated assets of up to $50,000 are based on a pending lawsuit that the Alston Foundation filed against eight former Casa Ruby board members and Casa Ruby’s founder and former executive director Ruby Corado in December 2022. The lawsuit accuses the board of violating D.C.’s nonprofit corporation law by failing to exercise oversight over Casa Ruby’s operations that led to its financial collapse and shutdown in 2022.
The lawsuit calls on the court to require Corado and the former board members to pay “restitution, compensatory damages, punitive damages, receivership fees and expenses, court costs, attorneys’ fees, and expenses, and any other relief the court deems necessary and proper.”
A D.C. Superior Court judge on May 1, 2023, dismissed the lawsuit filed by the Alston Foundation against all but one of the former Casa Ruby board members but did not dismiss the case against Corado.
The Alston Foundation has appealed the ruling dismissing the lawsuit, and the case is now pending before the D.C. Court of Appeals.
The lawsuit also alleges that the board failed to adequately oversee the actions of Corado, who pleaded guilty in July of this year to a charge of wire fraud as part of a plea bargain deal offered by prosecutors.
The charge to which Corado pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for D.C. says she allegedly diverted at least $150,000 “in taxpayer-backed emergency COVID relief funds” awarded to Casa Ruby to “private offshore bank accounts for her personal use,” according to a statement released by the U.S. Attorney’s office.
Corado, who initially denied the allegations against her, is currently staying with a family member in Rockville, Md., in a home detention arrangement following her arrest by the FBI on March 5 of this year. She is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 10.
D.C. Superior Court Judge Danya A. Dayson stated that her decision to dismiss the lawsuit against seven of the eight former board members was based on her interpretation of D.C. law. She said she believes the law holds that members of an organization’s board of directors can only be held liable for harming an organization like Casa Ruby if they “intentionally, rather than negligently, inflicted harm on Casa Ruby.”
The judge said she did not dismiss the case against one of the board members because the lawsuit presents evidence that the board member received some financial benefits from Corado.
In a legal brief filed with the appeals court, the Alston Foundation attorneys state that evidence shows the Casa Ruby board members “were deliberately indifferent or ‘willfully blind’ to the alleged wrongful conduct of the nonprofit’s executive director amounting to actual knowledge on their part that inaction would harm the nonprofit, ultimately and forcibly leading to its financial inability to continue operation.”
The former board members have declined requests for comment on the lawsuit.
Harrison, the attorney representing the Alston Foundation in the bankruptcy filing, said anyone who is owed money by Casa Ruby has until Jan. 21 to file a “proof of claim” form with the bankruptcy court to be eligible to be compensated if funds become available.
At the time of Casa Ruby’s shutdown, the organization’s employees were among those who said they were not paid in the months or weeks prior to the shutdown.
Asked what prompted the Alston Foundation to file the bankruptcy petition on behalf of Casa Ruby, Harris said, “Filing the bankruptcy petition ensures that a trustee with the appropriate expertise can wrap up the remaining issues while allowing the Wanda Alston Foundation to stay focused on its core mission.”
U.S. Bankruptcy Court records show that one of the officials in charge of collecting proof of claim forms for those owed money is Mark E. Albert, a court appointed Trustee for the bankruptcy filing. Court records show he can be reached at 202-728-3020.
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