Transgender UW Student Killed in Student Housing Sunday Night was the Seventh Trans Woman Attacked in Seattle in Twenty Months.
A 19-year-old transgender UW student was killed in off-campus student housing Sunday night. She was the seventh trans woman attacked in Seattle in twenty months, and the first not to survive.
A 19-year-old transgender woman was found dead in her laundry room at Nordheim Court Apartments, an off-campus student housing complex on the 5000 block of 25th Avenue Northeast in Seattle’s University District, late Sunday night. According to the Seattle Police Department, University of Washington police responded to a report of a stabbing at the building at approximately 10:10 p.m. Officers and Seattle Fire Department paramedics attempted to revive the victim, but she was pronounced dead at the scene.
The suspect — described by UW police as a Black man between 25 and 30 years old, 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-8, with a slim build, black hair and a beard, wearing a dark blue vest over a button-up shirt and blue jeans — fled the building and was last seen heading toward University Village. UW police said the suspect is not affiliated with the university.
The victim was a University of Washington student; her name had not been publicly released as of Tuesday morning and no arrest had been made. Nordheim Court was operated by UW Housing & Food Services until May 2024, when the university sold the complex to Greystar and Provident; the property continues to house UW students and is listed as off-campus student housing affiliated with the university.
The UW Trans Collective released a statement on Instagram Monday afternoon. “Last night, a 19-year-old woman was killed in student housing,” the collective wrote. “Reports state that the victim was a trans woman. We at TCUW and in the rest of the UW community, as a collective and as individuals, are devastated that another one of our sisters was taken from us. Trans women, particularly trans women of color, are among the most vulnerable populations to violent crimes.”
The collective, posting in collaboration with the UW chapters of Students for a Democratic Society and ICA, called on the public to refuse any coverage that deadnames the victim or removes her transness from the narrative. “If this woman is deadnamed in the media, do not stand for it,” the collective wrote. “If details of her transness are removed from the narrative, do not stand for it.” The group said it would be scheduling a vigil and asked the community to stay posted for further announcements.
What happened in the Nordheim Court laundry room Sunday night was, by the documented public record, the seventh attack on a trans woman in the Seattle area in twenty months — and the first to be fatal. The Stranger’s September 23, 2025 piece by Vivian McCall assembled the prior six cases; KOMO News and other local outlets have reported on the resulting charges and trials.
In September 2024, a man named Andre Karlow attacked a transgender Sound Transit fare ambassador at the Chinatown-International District light rail station. The following February, a Seattle man named Michael Martindell followed a trans woman off a bus and assaulted her; two strangers joined the attack. In March 2025, four men beat a transgender Navy veteran outside her workplace in the U District; she sustained a brain bleed, fractured teeth, and required hospitalization. Karlow was convicted of hate crime and assault in February of this year for that March attack. The slurs he used, according to King County prosecutors at trial, included “drag queen,” “take your makeup off,” and “Trump got rid of people like you.” He has more than a dozen prior felony convictions.
In June 2025, a man named Onosai Popio Faumuina initiated an attack on two trans women at Lake Union Park; other men joined, the women were dragged toward the water, and a handgun was fired. On September 2, 2025, three trans women — Madison Carstens, Michelle Caywood, and Denise Throckmorton — were attacked at the corner of 12th and Union in Capitol Hill by six or seven men; Carstens sustained a concussion and a ruptured eardrum. In the week before McCall’s piece was published, three teenage boys and a 25-year-old man attacked a trans woman at the Renton Transit Center.
The King County Prosecutor’s Office filed charges in four of the six prior cases, according to Yessenia Manzo, the senior deputy prosecutor who handles hate crimes for the office. Manzo told The Stranger in September that trans women are the only group in King County experiencing this pattern of organized group violence. No other protected category, in her office’s case record, is being targeted by groups of cisgender men in the way trans women are.
Sunday night’s stabbing brings the documented total to seven attacks. It is the first to leave a victim dead. It is the second to take place in the University District in fourteen months.
UW spokesperson Victor Balta issued a statement Monday saying the university could not confirm the victim’s identity until her family had been notified. “Nordheim Court is operated by Greystar,” Balta said, “and the UW is working with Greystar to ensure residents there are receiving support and resources in light of this tragedy.” UW President Robert J. Jones, in a separate statement reported by The Daily, acknowledged that the killing has particular resonance for LGBTQIA+ students. “While investigators have not yet identified a suspect or a motive, I want to recognize that when violence affects a trans person it can be especially worrying to our LGBTQIA+ community members,” Jones said, adding that the Division of Student Life was reaching out to affected students with support and resources.
Neither statement addressed the documented pattern of attacks on trans women in Seattle, the prior 2025 attack on a transgender Navy veteran outside her workplace in the same University District neighborhood, or the university’s decision to allow a registered student organization to host a speaker arguing against gender-affirming care two days after the stabbing. The Seattle Police Department’s Bias Crimes Unit, which has investigated previous attacks in the pattern, has not publicly confirmed its involvement in the May 10 case.
The University of Washington’s chapter of Turning Point USA is scheduled to host the ex-trans activist Chloe Cole at Kane Hall, Room 210, on Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. — two days after the stabbing. Cole’s public work argues that gender-affirming care is medical harm and that access to such care should be restricted, particularly for adolescents. She is among the most prominent national voices in the political project that produced the executive orders the Trump administration signed on trans issues during its first hundred days in office. The Cole event was scheduled before the May 10 stabbing. As of Tuesday morning, the University of Washington had not announced any change to the booking or cancellation of the event.
The event is the second TPUSA UW has hosted this spring under the “Pick Up the Mic Initiative,” a campus-speaker program the organization launched after the September 10, 2025 assassination of its co-founder, Charlie Kirk, at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. TPUSA’s campus-speaker programming has continued under the initiative, with confirmed 2026 appearances by Vice President JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, the conservative commentator Matt Walsh, and others.
The first TPUSA UW event of the spring was a “Prove Me Wrong” debate at the Husky Union Building on April 29, featuring the former Virginia state delegate and TPUSA-affiliated commentator Nick Freitas. University of Washington police arrested a counter-protester at that event after he refused to stop drumming during the speaker’s remarks; according to FOX 13 Seattle’s coverage, the arresting officers had given the protester multiple warnings to stop. The university has not, in the two weeks since, issued public guidance regarding TPUSA’s campus programming or the safety of students from marginalized communities during such events.
UW Divestment Campaign and the UW chapter of Students for a Democratic Society have organized a counter-protest at Kane Hall for Tuesday evening at 6 p.m., the same time and place as the Cole event. The same SDS chapter co-signed the Trans Collective’s statement Monday afternoon.
Washington State has positioned itself, in policy and in public messaging, as one of the most protective states in the country for transgender people. In April 2023, Governor Jay Inslee signed the Shield Law (HB 1469) and a companion provider-protection bill (HB 1340), the first of which protects people in Washington from civil and criminal actions in other states that restrict or criminalize gender-affirming care. The shield law, the state attorney general’s enforcement posture under Bob Ferguson and now Nick Brown, and the legislative protections passed under Inslee and continued under Governor Ferguson have together been described — by advocacy organizations, by trans-rights commentators, and by the state’s own communications — as a national policy contrast against the states that have built the criminalization regime trans people have spent the past several years fleeing. The state’s communications have invited that comparison and have encouraged trans people to relocate to Washington.
People have. The trans women attacked at 12th and Union, at Lake Union Park, at the Renton Transit Center, outside their U District workplace, and now in the laundry room of an off-campus UW housing complex were each living the life Washington’s protective infrastructure was supposed to allow them to live. The infrastructure did not reach them.
The UW Trans Collective said Monday it would be scheduling a vigil and asked the community to stay posted on its channel for the details. As of Tuesday morning, the Seattle Police Department was continuing to search for the suspect. The victim’s name had not been released.
“Please hold your trans siblings tight today,” the collective wrote. “Together we are stronger.”
I can’t hit the “like” icon on this, but shared on Bluesky and elsewhere. Trans folks are not doing anything like this to Cis folks. Horrible behavior inspired by idiots in religious circles and politicians. Remind all women to stick together and not be alone at night. Creepy people are out there with hateful rhetoric to fuel their hatred. I have chosen family who are trans. I’m sticking close to them in times like these. Protect Trans Lives, NOW!
This hits home for me as I have trans family members living in the Seattle area. Our local media has not covered the situation as you have laid out so thank you for sharing.