When Vallum found out that a friend had learned Williamson's gender identity, he went to her home in Alabama and persuaded her to get in his car and ride with him to Mississippi, the Justice Department said. There had been no contact between them until the night of the murder. “Like something me and my husband do is what him and Josh do.”Īt some point their relationship ended – the Justice Department this week did not say when – and Vallum and Williamson fell out of touch. “He bought him stuff he took him out to eat. "To me, I didn't think that anything was wrong with him," she said of Vallum. In an interview with The Sun Herald, a newspaper in Biloxi, Mississippi, Jenny Wilkins, Williamson's mother, said the relationship between Vallum and her daughter, to whom she referred using male pronouns, lasted 8 and a half months. “And yet today is the first time a perpetrator will be sentenced under federal hate crimes charges for killing a transgender person because that crime crossed a state line.” “There is an epidemic of violence against transgender people, and particularly women of color, across the country,” Hill said. In December, Vallum pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a federal hate crime statute signed into law in 2009. He pleaded guilty to a state-level murder charge and was sentenced to life in prison last July. Vallum is a member of the Latin Kings gang and decided to kill Williamson because he “believed he would be in danger” if other gang members learned that he had once dated a woman he knew to be transgender, the Justice Department said in a statement. Local news reports said that Williamson was 17 at the time of her death. Joshua Vallum, (29), killed Mercedes Williamson in May 2015, after the end of their relationship, because a friend learned that she was transgender, a fact Vallum kept hidden from friends and family while they dated. A Mississippi man has been sentenced to 49 years in prison for killing his transgender former girlfriend, a case the US Justice Department said was the first involving violence against a transgender person to be prosecuted under the federal Hate Crimes Act.
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