District of Columbia
Trans woman found dead in D.C.’s Marvin Gaye Park
Police cite possible drug overdose, but victim’s aunt says it was a hate crime
D.C. police are investigating the unexplained death of a 30-year-old transgender woman, Skylar Harrison Reeves, whose partially naked body was found on a park bench in a secluded section of Marvin Gaye Park on Oct. 2.
A Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson told the Washington Blade detectives from the department’s natural death squad are investigating the case as detectives await a determination by the D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the cause and manner of death, which could take up to 60 days or more.
“This case remains under investigation, and at this time there is no additional information to provide,” said police spokesperson Elizabeth Grannis.
But Rhonda Hailes, Skylar’s aunt, told the Blade that a homicide detective came to her house in Capitol Heights, Md., where Skylar was living, to inform her that her niece was found deceased in a D.C. park with her belongings missing and the dress she was wearing pulled up over her head, with her breasts exposed.
Hailes said the detective, whose last name she recalls is McWilliams, came to her home on Monday, Oct. 2, shortly after he said her niece’s body was found in a secluded section of Marvin Gaye Park.
The park, which a Blade reporter visited on Oct. 16, consists of a long, narrow wooded area with a creek running in the middle with trees and bushes, park benches, a nature trail, and fitness equipment located throughout the park.
According to Hailes, Det. McWilliams said police think Skylar may have died from a drug overdose, but he didn’t say how police came to that possible conclusion. Hailes said the detective’s graphic description of what he saw after park employees initially found the body and called police leads her to believe her niece did not die from a drug overdose, even though she may have occasionally used drugs.
“Her dress was up over her head off her body, her hand was over her genitals, her breasts were exposed,” Hailes said the detective told her. “I have a history with drugs myself,’ Hailes said. “I’m not bragging about it, but I’ve ODed myself,” she told the Blade, adding that the circumstances surrounding the body of her niece made it unlikely if not impossible that the cause of death was a drug overdose.
“How was she outside partially naked?” said Hailes. “How was she there with her dress over her head and her tits exposed and her hand over her genital area? That does not happen when you OD,” she said, adding that someone experiencing an overdose loses consciousness and could not take off their clothes.
“And the way my niece was found, it was a hate crime,” Hailes said, pointing to additional details she said the police detective told her. “Her purse, her phone, her credit cards, all of that stuff was gone.”
And, according to Hailes, the detective also told her investigators could not find any footprints from the tennis shoes Skylar was wearing on the muddy ground along the path leading to where she was found.
As if that were not enough, Hailes said Skylar, who was gainfully employed at the time of her death, never hung out at Marvin Gaye Park, which has a reputation of being a place where transgender sex workers sometimes congregate. She said she went to the park a short time after her niece’s death and showed photos of Skylar to the people who were hanging out in the park. None of them said they recognized Skylar as among those who hang out at Marvin Gaye Park.
“So how did she get there?” Hailes continued, saying she asked the detective if someone might have carried her niece into the park to the site where her body was found. She said the detective would only say the investigation was continuing.
“I’m not saying my niece is perfect,” Hailes said. “Nobody is. But I will stake my life and tell you I know my niece. My niece never hung out on Division Avenue,” which runs along the border of part of Marvin Gaye Park and is an area where trans sex workers sometimes congregate.
Under longstanding D.C. police protocol, homicide detectives are almost always called to the scene of an unexplained death. But the homicide detectives usually turn over the case to the natural death squad detectives, who continue the investigation until the medical examiner makes a determination of the cause and manner of death. If the medical examiner rules the death a homicide, then the homicide unit takes over the investigation.
“She has been shunned and persecuted all her life for being who she is,” Hailes said of her niece Skylar. “Yet my niece, she was a beautiful beacon of life. She could have been in the darkest room and shined it bright.”
Transgender activist Iya Dammons, who heads the recently opened D.C. Safe Haven, which provides services to the local trans community as well as to the LGBTQ community, said Safe Haven helped to organize a candlelight vigil in honor of Skylar on Oct. 9 at the entrance to Marvin Gaye Park at the intersection of Division Avenue and Foote Street, N.E.
Dammons noted that Skylar’s death is among many deaths of transgender women of color in the D.C. area in recent years, some of which are related to a drug overdose, but others involve anti-trans violence.
“And my thought here is there is an outcry that this is happening, and I don’t think D.C. is actually paying attention to the crisis,” Dammons said.
Like all possible crimes that have yet to be solved, D.C. police ask anyone who has information that may help in their investigation to contact police at 202-727-9099. An anonymous tip can also be sent by text message to the police TEXT TIP LINE at 50411.
District of Columbia
Ruby Corado sentenced to 33 months in prison
Former Casa Ruby director pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2024
A federal judge on Jan. 13 sentenced Ruby Corado, the founder and former executive director of the now closed D.C. LGBTQ community services organization Casa Ruby, to 33 months of incarceration for a charge of wire fraud to which she pleaded guilty in July 2024.
U.S. District Court Judge Trevor M. McFadden handed down the sentence that had been requested by prosecutors with the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia after Corado’s sentencing had been postponed six times for various reasons.
The judge also sentenced her to 24 months of supervised release upon her completion of incarceration.
In addition to the sentence of incarceration, McFadden agreed to a request by prosecutors to hold Corado responsible for “restitution” and “forfeiture” in the amount of $956,215 that prosecutors have said she illegally misappropriated from federal loans obtained by Casa Ruby.
The charge to which she pleaded guilty is based on allegations that she diverted at least $180,000 “in taxpayer backed emergency COVID relief funds to private offshore bank accounts,” according to court documents.
Court records show FBI agents arrested Corado on March 5, 2024, at a hotel in Laurel, Md., shortly after she returned to the U.S. from El Salvador, where authorities say she moved in 2022. Prosecutors have said in charging documents that she allegedly fled to El Salvador, where she was born, after “financial irregularities at Casa Ruby became public,” and the LGBTQ organization ceased operating.
Shortly after her arrest, another judge agreed to release Corado into the custody of her niece in Rockville, Md., under a home detention order. But at an Oct. 14, 2025, court hearing at which the sentencing was postponed after Corado’s court appointed attorney withdrew from the case, McFadden ordered Corado to be held in jail until the time of her once again rescheduled sentencing.
Her attorney at the time, Elizabeth Mullin, stated in a court motion that her reason for withdrawing from the case was an “irreconcilable breakdown in the attorney-client relationship.”
Corado’s newly retained attorney, Pleasant Brodnax, filed a 25-page defense Memorandum in Aid of Sentencing on Jan. 6, calling for the judge to sentence Corado only to the time she had already served in detention since October.
Among other things, Brodnax’s defense memorandum disputes the claim by prosecutors that Corado improperly diverted as much as $956,215 from federally backed loans to Casa Ruby, saying the total amount Corado diverted was $200,000. Her memo also states that Corado diverted the funds to a bank account in El Salvador for the purpose of opening a Casa Ruby facility there, not to be used for her personally.
“Ms. Corado has accepted responsibility for transferring a portion of the loan disbursements into another account she operated and ultimately transferring a portion of the loan disbursements to an account in El Salvador,” the memo continues.
“Her purpose in transferring funds to El Salvador was to fund Casa Ruby programs in El Salvador,” it says, adding, “Of course, she acknowledges that the terms of the loan agreement did not permit her to transfer the funds to El Salvador for any purpose.”
In his own 16-page sentencing recommendation memo, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Borchert, the lead prosecutor in the case, said Corado’s action amounted at the least to fraud.
“The defendant and Casa Ruby received no less than $1.2 million in taxpayer backed funds during the COVID-19 global health crisis,” he memo states. “But rather than use those funds to support Casa Ruby’s mission as the defendant promised, the defendant further contributed to its demise by unlawfully transferring no less than $180,000 of these federal emergency relief funds into her own private offshore bank accounts,” it says.
“Then, when media reports suggested the defendant would be prosecuted for squandering Casa Ruby’s government funding, she sold her home and fled the country,” the memo states. “Meanwhile, the people who she had promised to pay with taxpayer-backed funds – her employees, landlord, and vendors – were left behind flat broke.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office and Corado’s attorney didn’t immediately respond to a request from the Washington Blade for comment on the judge’s sentence.
“Ms. Corado accepts full responsibility for her actions in this case,” defense attorney Brodnax says in her sentencing memo. “She acknowledges the false statements made in the loan applications and that she used some of the money outside the United States,” it says.
“However, the money was still utilized for the same purpose and intention as the funds used in the United States, to assist the LGBTQ community,” it states. “Ms. Corado did not use the money to buy lavish goods or fund a lavish lifestyle.”
Brodnax also states in her memo that as a transgender woman, Corado could face abuse and danger in a correctional facility where she may be sent if sentenced to incarceration.
“Ruby Corado committed a crime, she is now paying the price,” said D.C. LGBTQ rights advocate Peter Rosenstein. “While it is sad in many ways, we must remember she hurt the transgender community with what she did, and in many ways they all paid for her crime.”
District of Columbia
Kennedy Center renaming triggers backlash
Artists who cancel shows threatened; calls for funding boycott grow
Efforts to rename the Kennedy Center to add President Trump’s name to the D.C. arts institution continue to spark backlash.
A new petition from Qommittee , a national network of drag artists and allies led by survivors of hate crimes, calls on Kennedy Center donors to suspend funding to the center until “artistic independence is restored, and to redirect support to banned or censored artists.”
“While Trump won’t back down, the donors who contribute nearly $100 million annually to the Kennedy Center can afford to take a stand,” the petition reads. “Money talks. When donors fund censorship, they don’t just harm one institution – they tell marginalized communities their stories don’t deserve to be told.”
The petition can be found here.
Meanwhile, a decision by several prominent musicians and jazz performers to cancel their shows at the recently renamed Trump-Kennedy Center in D.C. planned for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve has drawn the ire of the Center’s president, Richard Grenell.
Grenell, a gay supporter of President Donald Trump who served as U.S. ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term as president, was named Kennedy Center president last year by its board of directors that had been appointed by Trump.
Last month the board voted to change the official name of the center from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump And The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts. The revised name has been installed on the outside wall of the center’s building but is not official because any name change would require congressional action.
According to a report by the New York Times, Grenell informed jazz musician Chuck Redd, who cancelled a 2025 Christmas Eve concert that he has hosted at the Kennedy Center for nearly 20 years in response to the name change, that Grenell planned to arrange for the center to file a lawsuit against him for the cancellation.
“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit arts institution,” the Times quoted Grenell as saying in a letter to Redd.
“This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt,” the Times quoted Grenell’s letter as saying.
A spokesperson for the Trump-Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to an inquiry from the Washington Blade asking if the center still planned to file that lawsuit and whether it planned to file suits against some of the other musicians who recently cancelled their performances following the name change.
In a follow-up story published on Dec. 29, the New York Times reported that a prominent jazz ensemble and a New York dance company had canceled performances scheduled to take place on New Year’s Eve at the Kennedy Center.
The Times reported the jazz ensemble called The Cookers did not give a reason for the cancellation in a statement it released, but its drummer, Billy Hart, told the Times the center’s name change “evidently” played a role in the decision to cancel the performance.
Grenell released a statement on Dec. 29 calling these and other performers who cancelled their shows “far left political activists” who he said had been booked by the Kennedy Center’s previous leadership.
“Boycotting the arts to show you support the arts is a form of derangement syndrome,” the Times quoted him as saying in his statement.
District of Columbia
New interim D.C. police chief played lead role in security for WorldPride
Capital Pride says Jeffery Carroll had ‘good working relationship’ with organizers
Jeffery Carroll, who was named by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Dec. 17 as the city’s Interim Chief of Police, played a lead role in working with local LGBTQ community leaders in addressing public safety issues related to WorldPride 2025, which took place in D.C. last May and June
“We had a good working relationship with him, and he did his job in relation to how best the events would go around safety and security,” said Ryan Bos, executive director of Capital Pride Alliance.
Bos said Carroll has met with Capital Pride officials in past years to address security issues related to the city’s annual Capital Pride parade and festival and has been supportive of those events.
At the time Bowser named him Interim Chief, Carroll had been serving since 2023 as Executive Assistant Chief of Specialized Operations, overseeing the day-to-day operation of four of the department’s bureaus. He first joined the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department in 2002 and advanced to multiple leadership positions across various divisions and bureaus, according to a statement released by the mayor’s office.
“I know Chief Carroll is the right person to build on the momentum of the past two years so that we can continue driving down crime across the city,” Bowser said in a statement released on the day she announced his appointment as Interim Chief.
“He has led through some of our city’s most significant public safety challenges of the past decade, he is familiar with D.C. residents and well respected and trusted by members of the Metropolitan Police Department as well as our federal and regional public safety partners,” Bowser said.
“We have the best police department in the nation, and I am confident that Chief Carroll will meet this moment for the department and the city,” Bowser added.
But Bowser has so far declined to say if she plans to nominate Carroll to become the permanent police chief, which requires the approval of the D.C. City Council. Bowser, who announced she is not running for re-election, will remain in office as mayor until January 2027.
Carroll is replacing outgoing Chief Pamela Smith, who announced she was resigning after two years of service as chief to spend more time with her family. She has been credited with overseeing the department at a time when violent crime and homicides declined to an eight-year low.
She has also expressed support for the LGBTQ community and joined LGBTQ officers in marching in the WorldPride parade last year.
But Smith has also come under criticism by members of Congress, who have accused the department of manipulating crime data allegedly showing lower reported crime numbers than actually occurred. The allegations came from the Republican-controlled U.S. House Oversight Committee and the U.S. Justice Department
Bowser has questioned the accuracy of the allegations and said she has asked the city’s Inspector General to look into the allegations.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the D.C. police Office of Public Affairs did not immediately respond to a question from the Washington Blade about the status of the department’s LGBT Liaison Unit. Sources familiar with the department have said a decline in the number of officers currently working at the department, said to be at a 50-year low, has resulted in a decline in the number of officers assigned to all of the liaison units, including the LGBT unit.
Among other things, the LGBT Liaison Unit has played a role in helping to investigate hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ community. As of early Wednesday an MPD spokesperson did not respond to a question by the Blade asking how many officers are currently assigned to the LGBT Liaison Unit.
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