One night in the fall of 2011, Shelly Hilliard, an African-American teen-ager in Detroit—her family called her Treasure—went to her mother’s house for a plate of macaroni-and-cheese. Hilliard, who was transgender (born male, with the legal name Henry Hilliard, Jr.), left the house and didn’t come back that night or the next. Before long, one of her older sisters, Mechelle, noticed a disturbing trend on Facebook. “Everybody started posting, ‘Rest in Peace, Shelly,’ and ‘She’s with God now,’ and this and that,’ ” Mechelle recalled on a recent afternoon, as she sat with her mother, Lyniece Nelson, at a bright-red kitchen counter. “And we were like, ‘Hold on, we didn’t even get a call’ ”...
At first, because the victim was transgender, local officials believed that the murder was a hate crime. But several weeks later it became clear that Shelly’s death was connected to work she had done as a police informant. Just days before she was killed, cops had spotted Shelly and a friend smoking a blunt on the balcony of a Motel 6 in a Detroit suburb. When they raided the room, they found a sandwich bag with half an ounce of marijuana in the toilet tank. One of the officers threatened Shelly with prison—a particularly terrifying prospect for a transgender woman, who would be sent to a male facility—and then offered her a way out: she could set up her dealer, Qasim Raqib, and walk free that same day. She agreed.
Raqib was arrested after Shelly arranged the sting. Several hours later, he was released. He then tracked her down and, with the help of James Matthews, strangled, mutilated, burned, and dismembered her.
