A Michigan transgender man says he was the victim of a transphobic attack with a pellet gun while traveling on the sidewalk in his wheelchair.
Andrew Blake-Newton, 30, said he was shot five times Saturday from a car full of people who were taunting him and yelling anti-transgender slurs at him.
“No one should have to go through this.” Blake-Newton told WDIV-TV, an NBC affiliate in Detroit. “Nobody.”
The incident happened just after midnight as Blake-Newton was traveling from her home in Pontiac, outside Detroit, to the local gas station to buy a snack, she said. Blake-Newton told WDIV-TV that the people who shot him were in a small tan sedan and laughed at him as they drove away.
“It is reprehensible for someone to do such a cowardly and despicable thing to a person in a wheelchair, and must be held accountable,” Sheriff Michael Bouchard of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
Bouchard said a $1,000 reward is being offered for information leading to an arrest.
In a video interview with WDIV-TV, Blake-Newton showed what appeared to be pellet marks on various parts of her body, including her legs.
“It was so bad that I was leaking fluid and there were pools of fluid around my legs in the hospital,” he said. “Ever since this happened, I can’t get comfortable. I have barely been able to sleep because of the pain.”
Blake-Newton’s husband, Gareth Newton, expressed relief that his spouse did not suffer more serious injuries.
“I’m glad he’s still with me,” Newton told WDIV-TV. “It would have broken my heart if I had lost it.”
Blake-Newton said he was grateful that the weapon used by the assailants “was just a pellet gun.”
“I have seen transgender people of color on social media being shot and killed,” he said.
So far this year, the Human Rights Campaign, which tracks fatal violence against the transgender community, has reported the deaths of at least 14 trans and gender non-conforming people for violence, 12 of them trans people of color.
There has also been an increase in threats and attacks targeting LGBTQ Americans in general: A report from the Anti-Defamation League and LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, published last month, found that more than 350 incidents of anti-LGBTQ hate and extremism occurred in the US over an 11-month period beginning in June 2022.
