A Cook County jury on Oct. 23 found Tremon Hill not guilty of first-degree murder in the 2018 shooting death of De’Janay Stanton, a 24-year-old Black transgender woman.
“The phone is the entire case the state has,” Hill’s attorney Robyn Haynes told jurors, according to the Chicago Tribune. “They have no other evidence whatsoever.”
Hill, now 25, was 17 when Stanton died. The Tribune reported at the time of the verdict that he would be released on electronic monitoring because of a separate pending case.
Jurors deliberated for several hours Oct. 23 and sent several questions. Shortly before the verdict, they asked what would happen if they were deadlocked. They reached a decision before the judge and lawyers could answer. Stanton’s family was in the courtroom at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
Prosecutors Argued Phone Records Linked Hill to the Killing
Stanton was found around 11 a.m. on Aug. 30, 2018, beside a sedan in an alley in the 4000 block of South King Drive. She’d been shot in the head, police said at the time, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Hill was charged as an adult with first-degree murder in January 2019 and ordered held without bail, Fox 32 Chicago reported.
At trial, which opened Oct. 21 before Cook County Judge Pamela Stratigakis, prosecutors said Hill met Stanton at a motel in July 2018. Afterward, they said, he got scared people would find out and asked her to delete photos and messages.
“The evidence … will show the defendant’s increasing desperation to hide his secret, until finally he realized that the only way he could hide it was to kill the only person who knew about it,” Assistant State’s Attorney Jennifer Cooper said in her opening, the Tribune reported.
“(The pings) showed the victim’s phone and the defendant’s phone coming together in the secluded alley,” Cooper said.
To show the phone was Hill’s, prosecutors used texts about his family and his life, including the birth of his child. “It is too many coincidences to be a coincidence,” Cooper told the jury.
Assistant State’s Attorney Sara Grgurovic put it this way in closing: “The secret is out.”
Hill’s Defense Said No Witness or DNA Linked Him to De’Janay Stanton
Hill’s lawyers said no witness put him there. His fingerprints weren’t on Stanton’s car and his DNA wasn’t on her body, Haynes told jurors. She asked why anyone planning a killing would do it in daylight, in an alley lined with apartments.
Assistant Public Defender Sarah Anderson opened by calling Stanton’s death “an absolute tragedy” and saying her family deserved answers. “But the answer isn’t Tremon Hill,” she said.
The Human Rights Campaign has counted almost 400 fatal attacks on transgender and gender-nonconforming people since 2013, nearly 60% of them Black trans women, the Tribune reported.
“It continues to be a serious issue within the community, and our larger community needs to be paying attention to it,” Elizabeth Payne, legal director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, told the Tribune before the verdict.
Valerie Griffin Waited Eight Years for a Trial in Her Daughter’s Death
Before the verdict, Valerie Griffin, Stanton’s mother, told the Tribune that Stanton often let other trans women stay with her after they’d been forced out of their homes. “She was a beautiful soul,” Griffin said. “She always tried to help people.”
Two months after the shooting, Griffin told ABC7 Chicago she believed being trans may have played a partial role in the killing. “It doesn’t seem like society and police are too worried about what is happening to them,” she said in 2018.
Griffin said before the trial that the wait had been “a painful eight years.”
The acquittal leaves the question of who killed Stanton unanswered.
