Kendrell Lavar Lyles, a 33-year-old man, has been charged with murder in three recent killings in the Dallas area, including the highly-publicized shooting death of transgender woman Muhlaysia Booker, according to the New York Times.
Lyles has also been charged in the shooting death of a woman in late May and a drug-related killing of a man the following day. The names of those victims have not been released.
Lyles is also a person of interest in the murder of Chynal Lindsey, a 26-year-old transgender woman, in 2015.
From the report:
Major Geron said Mr. Lyles was a “person of interest” in the killing of Ms. Lindsey, who was pulled from White Rock Lake on June 1. He said it was unclear if Mr. Lyles had anything to do with other killings of transgender women in the city.
“We continue to investigate them and will look to see if there are ties to Lyles to those other cases,” he said.
Following the arrest of Lyles, Jessica Anderson, a childhood best friend of Muhlaysia Booker, shared her mixed views on the arrest.
“It’s the strangest thing because I thought it was going to make me happy or give me a sense of relief and in some aspects it does,” Anderson said.
“But at the same time, it’s just one of those things that he still gets to live and then she doesn’t. At the end of the day, I still don’t have any actual answer as to why; what was so necessary, what was so crucial that you had to take her life like that?”
Black transgender women are the most often targeted victims in violent attacks against the transgender community. In 2018, there were at least 26 deaths of transgender people that were a result of fatal violence in the United States, data from the Human Rights Campaign states.
