Man charged in 2020 killing of trans woman Asia Jynaé Foster

Houston police this week announced the arrest of a man accused of killing a Black transgender woman nearly two years ago.

Jermal Tyrelle Richards, 32, was charged Thursday with murder in the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Asia Jynaé Foster.

Investigators say that her body was found on Nov. 20, 2020 — a day known as Transgender Day of Remembrance — by a man walking in Southwest Houston, who notified authorities.

Asia Jynaé Foster

When officers arrived at the scene, they “found Ms. Foster with at least one gunshot wound,” HPD Homicide Division Detectives W. Huff and J. Nguyen reported.

Foster, who was described by her friends as “outgoing” and “funny,” was one of 44 known transgender or gender non-conforming people killed in the U.S. in 2020.

Nearly all of them were trans women of color.

“Our hearts go out to Asia’s family and we hope they can finally get some much-needed closure,” the Montrose Center, a Houston-based organization that works to empower the LGBTQ community, said in a tweet Thursday afternoon.

Bird Foster, Asia’s mother, told local television station KTRK-TV that she wants “to see (Richards) wake up every day behind bars. He has to see it every day, the rest of this life.”

She said that she’d always accepted her daughter just the way she was, saying that the senseless violence against trans women across the county is “absolutely an epidemic.”

“A lot of transgender women are being targeted, fear for their life all the time,” Cynthia G, an aunt who raised Asia, added. “Why, why? They’re just humans, trying to live their life, and there’s hate.”

Last year marked the deadliest year on record for trans people in the nation., with at least 56 deaths — nearly all of them Black and Latina trans women. At least 31 trans people have been killed in the U.S. in 2022 so far.