Advocates questioned Black transgender woman’s death. Now, cops are reviewing the case. – NJ.com

Ashley Moore’s mom went on Facebook to wish her child a happy 27th birthday on April 9, but she was met with posts saying “rest in peace” instead.

“I sat in my car shaking,” said Starlet Carbins, who was working as a nurse in Vermont at the time. “What I later found out was that my child died on April 1.

“No one notified me.”

That is what started Carbins’ months-long search for answers from Newark police hundreds of miles away.

Some of what Carbins would eventually learn came as a shock to her: Moore was a transgender woman who was living in and around Newark for several years, sometimes in shelters. Carbins said her child never revealed her gender identity to her, but says she would have been accepting of it had she known.

She and LGBTQ advocates say they found the process in which police handled the case to be frustrating: the first officer assigned to the case would only accept her phone calls after 1 a.m. when his shift started, it took months for the mom to receive a police report on her daughter’s case, and they say cops never searched Moore’s room for indications of foul play.

Newark police would tell her that Moore likely jumped to her death from the roof of the YM/WCA on 600 Broad St. in Newark during the early morning hours. Or, police early on said, she could’ve been struck by a car, based on an early assessment from a doctor at University Hospital.

A final autopsy from the New Jersey Medical Examiner’s Office, an agency notoriously slow and backlogged, has still not been finalized four months after Moore’s death, the family says. The medical examiner is awaiting the results of the toxicology report to make a final determination on the cause of death, Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose told NJ Advance Media last week.

Ambrose said Moore’s death was a suicide. But after receiving multiple follow up questions from NJ Advance Media about Moore’s case since July 31, Ambrose put out a statement Tuesday saying he reached out to the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office to ask for its Homicide Task Force to review her death.

“This unfortunate incident has officially been ruled as a suicide,” Ambrose said. “And to date, our detectives have not discovered evidence to the contrary. However, I have reached out to Essex County Prosecutor Theodore Stephens and requested a review of Ms. Moore’s death by the county’s Homicide Task Force.

“Upon completion of the Homicide Task Force’s review, we will apprise Ms. Moore’s family of the outcome of these findings.”

Carbins said she believes her daughter’s injuries – a disfigured and swollen neck, ligature marks on her legs and rectal bleeding – are indications that her child had been raped.

Police told her city cameras panned and did not show a car or the moments leading up to Moore being found on the ground outside the YM/WCA. Surveillance video from inside the building did not show Moore entering the lobby of the YM/WCA either so they surmised she went to the roof, police told her.

But Moore’s mom and advocates say a full investigation looking into all possible causes should’ve began immediately after Moore was found and not begin months after the medical examiner’s office makes a final determination.

“She was just another Black, dead trans woman (to police),” said Newark LGBTQ Community Center Executive Director Beatrice Simpkins. “There was no need to marshal the resources of the police department to find out what happened to her.”

An incident report that was provided to NJ Advance Media explains what responding officers observed when they arrived around 4 a.m. on April 1 to the YM/WCA.

Officials from the YM/WCA said they could not comment for this story until their CEO returned from vacation on Aug. 17. The building has rooms for rent and also reserves five floors in its building as a shelter, so it’s unclear if Moore sought shelter there. A counselor, the organization’s website says, is on duty on each shelter floor at all times.

The police report incorrectly refers to Moore as a male throughout, but Ambrose’s statement on Tuesday correctly referred to her as a woman.

A maintenance worker told police someone told him there was a person lying outside around 4:15 a.m. The maintenance worker told the on-duty security guard, who called police.

A witness, whose name was redacted from the report, told police they saw Moore run out of her apartment and down the stairs at 3:47 a.m. The witness said they had been using the bathroom shared by residents on the floor and was walking back to their unit.

Two officers found Moore laying on her stomach on the sidewalk in front of the YW/MCA, an 11-story building across the street from Military Park in downtown Newark. The officers tried to wake Moore, but she was unresponsive and had no pulse.

First responders performed chest compressions and used the opioid overdose reversal drug Narcan, but nothing happened. Moore was pronounced dead at 5:06 a.m. at University Hospital, the report said.

A doctor there stated “he believed that the victim may have been struck by a vehicle” since Moore’s “neck was grossly disfigured and was swollen in addition to there being ligature marks on (her) legs and rectal bleeding, which is consistent with a pedestrian being struck.”

The crash unit at the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office spoke with staff at the hospital, who said they would not make a final determination on the cause of death because they were deferring to the state medical examiner’s autopsy.

A crime scene unit responded and took photographs, but it’s unclear if it was from the prosecutor’s office or the Newark Police Division.

Prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Katherine Carter declined to answer detailed questions about how it decided to not handle Moore’s case even though a doctor alluded that her death may have been caused by a hit and run driver. The prosecutor’s office investigative staff generally handles homicide cases.

“We were not involved in the investigation,” Carter wrote in an email last week. “Newark has been handling it. We only get involved when it is a homicide. It was not a homicide at that point.”

Carter did not immediately respond Tuesday afternoon when asked if the prosecutor’s office would take on the case.

Carbins said she traveled a lot for work as a nurse and decided to move out of state about eight years ago when Moore was 19. Moore, who was living in Freehold with her mom and younger brother at the time, decided to stay behind in New Jersey.

She said did not know her daughter had been living in Newark or had stayed at homeless shelters. Had she known, Carbins said, she would have taken her in.

The items that were recovered by a family friend from her room at the YM/WCA did not reveal much about Moore: two cellphones and a laptop cannot be unlocked. Moore’s family still questions why police didn’t collect the phone to search for answers, but an officer on the case told the family in a recorded phone call which NJ Advance Media listened to that officers didn’t have a warrant to do so.

“They saw a young black woman on the street and assumed (she) was not wanted, not loved,” Carbins said.

Moore’s mom is in possession of her daughter’s writings, a passion that started after she read “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” as a child. She would go on to work as a chef at One World Observatory in Manhattan, too.

“Ashley loved people but Ashley always led with connection…‘How do I make this person happy?‘” Carbins said. “Sometimes at her own detriment. It was very important to Ashley to fit in, not belong. But fit in.”

The mom lost contact with Moore for a few years but began to intermittently communicate with her child on social media. The last time they spoke was in February when Moore called her mom at 2 a.m. in a panic saying someone was after her.

“‘I think somebody’s after me,’” Carbins recalled her daughter say. “‘I know I sound crazy.‘”

The call was concerning to Carbins because she said she sounded paranoid. But ultimately, Moore’s younger brother was able to calm her down after talking about moving in together. Moore told him she wanted to start her own hair product line that night too, the mom said.

But Moore, according to her own account, also experienced hardship.

Moore said in a 2018 Instagram post she had been mugged. She said police declined to file a report at the station and dispatch refused to send an officer after calling her homophbic slur, she said, she identified as trans female.

“We are investigating the statements made by Ashley Moore in her 2018 Instagram video,” Ambrose told NJ Advance Media. “Although we were notified of this incident today, the complaint will be handled by our Office of Professional Standards for a swift and thorough investigation of the facts.”

The Newark Police Division is under federal monitoring after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found a pattern of unconstitutional practices about five years ago among cops. The DOJ found anecdotal evidence that officers had discriminated against people because of their gender identity or sexual orientation, with some officers even making the false assumption that all transgender women are prostitutes.

Last year, the police department began to issue guidance about how officers should interact with people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning. The state Attorney General’s Office last year also issued a directive to New Jersey law enforcement agencies about how to treat transgender people appropriately.

It is difficult to track the rates of suicide and violence against people who are transgender because they are often identified with the incorrect gender. More than half of transgender male teens who participated in an American Academy of Pediatrics study from two years ago had attempted suicide, while LGBTQ advocates tracked at least 26 killings of transgender or gender non-conforming people in the U.S. in 2018.

Moore’s mom began to reach out to her daughter’s friends on social media to learn about what happened to her daughter, and eventually one of them told her to contact Newark police. No one from Newark police reached out to Carbins to notify her of her daughter’s death.

Local advocates say cops could have possibly tracked down’s Moore’s next of kin more easily if the police department’s LGBTQ liaisons contacted the Newark LGBTQ Community Center. Simpkins, the center’s executive director, told NJ Advance Media that no one from the police department contacted her about the county’s Homicide Task Force being asked to look into the case before a press release was issued about it, either.

“I’m still disappointed that there has been little to no communication with the family,” Simpkins said. “Director Ambrose has not reached out to them and he hasn’t reached out to the LGBT community either. So I’m glad he took this action but I was expecting a dialogue with the police department, not just simply putting out a press release statement.

“The family needs an apology about ignoring them completely and never even attempting to find the family.”

An online fundraiser was set up to create a legal retainer so a lawyer could be hired to help push for an investigation into Moore’s death. It has collected about $3,200 out of a goal of $35,000 so far.

If you or someone you know may be at risk of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. If you’re a young LGBTQ person and need to talk to someone, call The Trevor Project’s 24-hour crisis hotline for youth at 1-866-488-7386. If you are a transgender person of any age, call the Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860.

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Rebecca Panico may be reached at rpanico@njadvancemedia.com.