By May 5, 2020, Jayne Thompson had been hitchhiking across the desolate Southwestern desert for weeks. She was meandering along the edge of the highway near Moab, a dusty tourist destination in eastern Utah, when a local sheriff's deputy spotted her.
The deputy asked Thompson to move to an adjacent walking path, farther from oncoming traffic, police records show. But for about a mile, she kept wandering back to the white line. Thompson was carrying a walking stick and a vintage dagger, which friends said she kept for protection while traveling.
Something appeared to be off. When the deputy, now joined by a sergeant and highway-patrol officer, asked for her name, Thompson said she was "Neo, from outer space." She didn't appear to be a threat, so the officers parted ways after Thompson explained that she was headed to "the great beyond."
In reality, Thompson, a 33-year old transgender woman, was headed to Grand Junction, Colorado. That's where she stood by the side of the road four days later, on the morning of May 9, when a man called 911 to request a welfare check. He worried that Thompson — who was standing still for so long that passersby thought she was a mannequin — wasn't well. When the man tried to speak with her, police records show, Thompson offered only a "1,000-yard stare."
A Colorado state trooper named Jason Wade, a Marine veteran with a haircut to match, responded to the scene. As he later recounted to investigators, his request for backup, made while he was still on the way, was his first during his nine years as a trooper. Like his counterparts in Moab, Wade indicated that he, too, thought something was off.
In the weeks leading up to that morning, Thompson had spiraled into a deep depression, friends and colleagues said. She'd spent most of 2020 working at a bar in Bisbee, Arizona, an old mining town on the border. Thompson suddenly left town after several outbursts at work left colleagues concerned she might be suicidal.
"She had issues with substance abuse and signs of mental illness. I'm not sure if one led to the other," said Dana House, the owner of The Quarry Bisbee and Thompson's former boss. House said mental health services were "impossible" to obtain in the small town of Bisbee, situated nearly 100 miles from Tucson, the nearest large city.
Thompson arrived in Bisbee — an LGBTQ-friendly community that House described as "a blue dot in a sea of red" in politically conservative Arizona — from her home state of Ohio in late 2019. Earlier that year, Thompson's brother died after he was run over in his wheelchair; several years prior, her sister was murdered.
"There was a lot of trauma," House said. "She didn't let people get too close."
Like most people in Thompson's life, House didn't know where she was on May 9, 2020. She was standing motionless at the corner of a busy intersection in Grand Junction when Wade, the state trooper, stepped out of his patrol car and approached her. When Wade identified himself, he later told investigators, Thompson reached into her waistband and retrieved a dagger — likely the same one she'd been carrying outside Moab.
Footage from Wade's dashboard camera captures a clanging sound that appears to have been her dagger falling to the ground. Wade then takes several steps backward and screams at Thompson, "Get on the ground!" He points his gun at her, and, for the first of hundreds of instances by law enforcement over the following days, misgenders Thompson, telling a dispatcher, "He pulled a knife on me."
The final 11 seconds of Thompson's life were caught on the dashcam. She grabs something from the ground, which Wade later said was the dagger. Thompson runs around Wade, nearly veering into oncoming traffic, before turning around and running back toward him. Wade repeatedly tells her to "get on the ground." In his account to investigators, corroborated by the footage, Wade said Thompson "planted, turned, and took several steps towards me with the knife extended out."
Wade opens fire. Four bullets from his pistol send Thompson's body tumbling to the ground.
He continues to point his gun at her while waiting for backup. At one point, after yelling at Thompson to drop the knife, Wade mutters under his breath, "Goddamnit."
As other officers arrived, Thompson lay motionless on the ground. Nearly eight minutes had passed since Wade began shooting. Instead of offering first aid, one officer shot her in the leg with a less-lethal round in a brutal attempt to determine whether she was alive. When she didn't respond, officers used her walking stick to dislodge the dagger she still clutched in her hand and handcuff her.
Thompson had no pulse. An autopsy found that a bullet had pierced her heart and right lung, killing her on the spot.
A lack of accountability
Insider spent the past year investigating deaths of transgender and gender-nonconforming people from 2017 to 2021, collecting extensive documentation and interviewing friends and family members of those who died. We found that five people were killed by police officers. Of those who died in custody during this period, we identified three cases — Roxsana Hernández, Johana Medina León, and Layleen "Xtravaganza" Cubilette-Polanco — where the deaths sparked substantial allegations of negligence. A fourth, Penélope Díaz Ramírez, was strangled by a fellow prisoner. We included these nine cases in our database of 175 homicides.
Among the police killings, we found patterns. Documents obtained by Insider show that in every case, officers quickly turned to use of force, with lethal consequences. All but one of those killed by the police were in the midst of mental health crises. While the individuals in each case were armed, Insider found no evidence that the officers involved attempted to de-escalate. And none used less-lethal forms of force.
None of the five homicides have resulted in charges against the officers. In four of the cases, the deadly use of force was deemed justified by local prosecutors; the investigation into the 2017 killing of Kiwi Herring remains open. In two of the killings, the identities of the officers who pulled the trigger have been hidden from the public; Insider was able to identify the officers involved in Herring's killing through police records.
Experts who study police use of force said both mental illness and transgender status put people at greater risk when confronted by law enforcement. An investigation by the Washington Post found that one in five police killings since 2015 involved mental illness; our sample size, while much smaller, shows a substantially higher rate.
Finding mental health assistance is especially challenging in rural areas like Grand Junction or Sharon, Pennsylvania, where a police officer shot and killed Sean Hake, a 23-year-old transgender man, in 2017. Research shows that discrimination, a dearth of providers, and lack of access to transportation are common barriers to mental health care for transgender people in rural areas.
W. Carsten Andresen, a criminology professor at St. Edward's University who has studied homicides of transgender people, reviewed case documents for each of the police killings Insider identified over the past five years. He questioned why Wade immediately confronted Thompson upon arriving at the intersection. He noted that Thompson wasn't a threat to anyone when Wade arrived, and that the trooper was called to conduct a welfare check. If Wade was concerned enough to call for backup, Andresen said, "Just sit there and wait."
Thompson's death shook the community of Grand Junction, including the man who called 911. He placed the call after trying to talk with Thompson. In an interview with police investigators, the man was described as "very emotional" and was "struggling with feeling responsible" for Thompson's death.
The investigation didn't take long. Ten days after Thompson's death, the local district attorney Daniel Rubinstein announced he wasn't filing charges against Wade. Had Thompson survived, he said, he would have filed "felony assault, attempted assault, and menacing charges" against her.
Among the pieces of evidence investigators collected from the crime scene was a cardboard sign. In black marker, Thompson had scrawled the words "KNOW PEACE."
'Unnecessary and excessive'
When Wade sat down with his lawyer and two investigators assigned to the case, he described his training in the so-called 21-foot rule, which grew out of an influential 1984 SWAT Magazine article by Dennis Tueller, a Salt Lake City police sergeant at the time. Tueller conducted a series of role-plays and concluded that someone 21 feet or closer could theoretically stab an officer with a knife before the officer could unholster their gun and shoot.
That "rule" has come under scrutiny in recent years. Randy Shrewsberry, the executive director of The Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform, told PBS' "Frontline" last year that the concept "has no scientific basis at all" and failed to provide officers with guidance on how to properly assess a threat. Tueller himself has said repeatedly that he never intended to create a standard, lamenting that police trainers sometimes "bastardize" the guidance to justify shootings.
In addition to Thompson, Insider investigated three other police killings in which the person was wielding a knife when they were shot. In no case did officers attempt less-lethal force, such as a Taser, before shooting.
After the police killed Sean Hake outside his home in Pennsylvania, records listed his manner of death as "suicide." But Hake didn't die by suicide — he was killed when a trio of officers from the Sharon Police Department responded to his mother's call for help during a domestic dispute with her son.
As the officers sped toward the house, dispatchers told them Hake was emotionally unstable and had "been involved in suicidal and self-harm incidents." Hake was sitting in a car outside the home with a box cutter, which he'd just used to cut himself, when officers confronted him.
Hake got out of the car and "moved quickly" toward the officers, records show. After they yelled at him to drop the box cutter, Hake continued to walk toward one of them, saying, "fuck you, shoot me," two officers later told investigators. Sgt. Ryan Chmura said the officers "were out of options" when he fired three rounds at Hake, killing him on the spot.
The day before he was killed, Hake took to Facebook to share big news: his doctor and his psychologist had signed off on a consultation for gender-affirming surgery. Hake's first appointment would be later that month.
"This is going to be such an amazing experience. Life changing," Hake wrote. "I wanna cry I'm soo insanely happy."
About 36 hours later, Hake was dead.
Hake's family filed a civil-rights lawsuit. In responding to the lawsuit, lawyers for the Sharon Police Department denied that the claims in the case, which moved quickly to settlement talks, had "merit."
An expert report prepared for the family by the criminologist Paul McCauley, a former Pennsylvania police officer, found the use of deadly force against Hake "was unnecessary and excessive." McCauley noted that none of the Sharon police officers warned Hake that they might shoot. Given the distance between Hake and the officers at the time of the shooting, McCauley found that a Taser or pepper spray could have been used effectively. With three officers at the scene, he added, two could have resorted to shooting Hake as a last-ditch approach had less-lethal options been ineffective.
The officers, McCauley found, failed to establish "a coordinated tactical plan that considered lesser force options, which was contrary to accepted police practices." Worse, McCauley said, the officers lacked training on how to interact with people in a mental health crisis. Between dispatchers alerting officers about Hake's history of mental illness and Hake's "shoot me" comment, McCauley said officers should've recognized that they might be facing a "suicide by cop" scenario.
"The police objective in these situations," McCauley wrote, "is not to accommodate, but to de-escalate and prevent the harm."
The minutes leading up to a police response to a crisis situation can be as critical as the moments after arrival, advocates say. Crisis-intervention organizations such as CIT International, a training and awareness nonprofit, have long argued for plainclothes officers to work in tandem with emergency medical personnel when responding to a crisis situation or welfare check.
"Law enforcement does and always will have a role to play in a crisis-response system," CIT International's executive director, Ron Bruno, told Insider. "However, that role should be in support of a robust system that provides non-law enforcement options when appropriate, including triaging of 911 calls for possible diversion to crisis lines for resolution."
Alternative crisis-intervention teams, which generally consist of social workers and emergency medical technicians, have been tested in cities across the country in recent years. In some cities, these teams have responded to nearly 20% of all calls.
Who killed Tony McDade?
That Thompson and Hake were struggling with their mental health was clear to many people who interacted with them in the weeks leading up to their deaths. The same was true for Tony McDade, a 38-year old transgender man who lived in Tallahassee, Florida.
Snapshots of the week leading up to McDade's death in May 2020 are scattered across social-media posts and news stories. He had been dating a woman who lived in the same complex as the apartment he shared with his mother. After the relationship ended, McDade got into an argument with the woman's adult son, Malik, who, relatives said, was trying to protect his mother from McDade's unpredictable outbursts and threats of violence. Malik, along with several of his family members, attacked McDade outside the apartment complex the day before McDade was killed by police.
That night, McDade posted a live video to Facebook. Filmed in a dark room with cinderblock walls, he holds his phone close for 88 minutes, peering intently into the camera, his raspy voice oscillating between the past and the present. Violence and depression are constant themes. McDade is somber, describing the sexual violence that had scarred generations of his family. He laughs while explaining that women won't let you help them with laundry "until it's been washed." More than anything, McDade is angry, vowing revenge for the attack against him.
McDade's mother, Wanda, calls him a few times as he's recording. "Wanda, lay down," he says. "Lay down and rest your nerves." At one point, McDade asks viewers for ammunition for a handgun he'd acquired — one that he wasn't legally allowed to possess after spending much of the past 20 years in prison on drug and weapons charges.
McDade often returns to the concept of masculinity. "Y'all motherfuckers were born men," he says, addressing his attackers. "It took five of you to kick and punch and have me on the ground."
"I should have been fucked up. And look at me," McDade brags, pointing to a spot on his face. "These two little knots, they're so little you can barely see them." He repeatedly vows violence. "Me and the law will have a standoff after I end you bitches," McDade says, adding that he was "killing and going to be killed, because I will not go back into federal prison."
