Forgotten Assault

Immediately after the violence, they walked. The attack itself was hell, of course, but now the walk was somehow worse. One gripped a stick, the other a pipe. Bleeding and battered, they found a train station and rode east to the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center in the early hours of a September morning in 2011.

An hour prior, they had exited MetroHealth Medical Center, where the staff refused to call them a cab and where one staff member pointed them toward a pay phone. “We were just robbed!” they said, changing no one’s mind.

And so they walked, with their sole companion on the trek the roiling fear born hours earlier during the violence.

***

Zoë Lapin is seated at the committee table in Room 217 of Cleveland City Hall. She’s surrounded by 100 or so heads that bob and shake as she talks on a cold day in November 2014.

“We’re just like everyone else. This is about a person’s liberation to live their life unapologetically,” Lapin says, and the largest crowd this room has hosted in recent memory hoists yellow signs reading, “Thank You.” The sizable congregation is present for the debate on public restrooms and whether the city’s transgender population may use the restroom that matches their gender identity. The absurdity of the issue — the very existence of a conversation on whether transgender people in Cleveland have the same human rights as non-transgender people — isn’t lost on the attendees.

“We contribute and we deserve every right to live our life and live our truth,” Lapin says. She’s a transgender woman and, particularly, via these last few violent years, a local activist for the community. When she spoke up for Cemia “CeCe” Dove, the people listened. Now, the people are applauding.

CeCe Dove was killed in January 2013. She was beaten, stabbed 40 times, tied to a concrete block and left to sink to the bottom of an Olmsted Township pond.

When news of her death careened into headlines in April 2013, a city’s near-total ignorance of the trans community’s oppression flared into technicolor. Somewhere, lost in a numb haze, a woman named Zoerella Page took in the news. It was all so goddamned familiar, she thought. The only difference was that she had survived her own brutal assault.

***

First, the bicycle hit the ground. Then came the shouting. Then came the punches.

Zoerella Page, then 41, and her girlfriend, a transgender woman named Jenny*, just a shade over 25, were out later than usual on Sept. 22, 2011, their evening walk extended briefly by a charity event at Pet-Tique on Clifton. Back then, they would go running during the day, so nighttime was reserved for neighborhood walks. They were usually home before dark. (*The woman could not be reached for this story despite multiple attempts and will be referred to hereafter simply as Jenny.)

That Thursday, though, twilight was already descending as the two walked east on the north side of Clifton Boulevard toward their apartment building near Detroit Avenue and the West Boulevard transit station. Traffic was light, so they decided to cross early and jaywalk to the south side of the street. They were getting close to West Boulevard when a group of five black men passed by.

Zoerella heard a bike clatter to the ground. She turned around, thinking maybe someone fell off. Maybe she could help them up.

Then the shouting began.

“Hell no! What are you faggots doing here? What are you faggots doing in our neighborhood?” The words flew out, immediate and angry. The five men approached the girls in a line. One eyed Zoerella’s backpack. “What you got in the bag?”

“Run!” she told Jenny. “I’ll keep these guys busy. Just run!”

Zoerella couldn’t run as fast as Jenny, but she did have a mean right hook. She was a lot of woman back then. Military vet. Did a run in Mogadishu 20 years prior. She dropped her backpack and tossed up the fists, bracing for a fight she had little chance of winning.

Jenny scampered down Clifton, banging on doors without answer, looking for a passing car on what was then an empty street.

Then the punches. “We’re gonna fuck you fags up!” The men — some only boys, really — surrounded Zoerella. They pounded fists to her chest, again, again, and someone behind her pushed her to the ground. The circle tightened. Heavy shoes kicked her ribs and head. She’d stumble upward and then get knocked down again. One of the men found a brick and slammed it into her face, breaking her nose. The shouting continued. “We’re gonna fuck you fags up!”

Zoerella’s survival instinct kicked into high gear as she looked for a streetlight. She had to get out of the dark; she had to get somewhere somebody could see what was happening.

Jim Laule, an off-duty Lakewood firefighter, caught a glimpse of the fracas and stopped his car. Jenny was further down the street by then, blood racing down her arms after she shattered a glass door, adrenaline pumping furiously, while banging for help. Laule scared off the group, most of whom scattered south down the road with Zoerella’s backpack.

That should have been the end of the violence. The problem was that things only got worse from there. Provided you don’t end up dead, broken bones tend to heal. For the transgender community, it’s the system that keeps the pain alive.

***

Jack* is drinking an ice-cold Dr. Pepper and talking about that night, three long years after it all happened. (*The subject asked that his real name not be used. He will be referred to simply as Jack here on out.)

“You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” he says, sitting in his apartment in suburban Medina, far away from Detroit Avenue in Cleveland. This was one of the few places in the area that didn’t give him and his now-fiancée any guff when they applied as tenants, he says. They felt welcomed, which was nice.

He lights up, and his voice, already quiet, wavers. What’s unfortunate is just how common this sort of thing is nowadays, he says. You don’t hear much about this stuff on the news, but it happens all the time. “That whole area is out of control,” he says about his former neighborhood.

Jack purses his lips and begins to recount the story of Sept. 22, 2011. He doesn’t talk about the date specifically, simply qualifying time as “before the violence” and “after the violence.”

“For some reason, there was no traffic,” he says, exhaling. “We figured, what the hell, we’ll cross early. If we wouldn’t have crossed early, this might not have ever happened.” And if the attack hadn’t happened, Jack might still be living as Zoerella Page.

He’d begun the transition to life as a woman in February 2011, seven months before the violence.

Years of post-traumatic stress disorder therapy connected the dots from his life in wartime to the questions about gender and self-identity that coursed through his childhood. In the late 1980s, Jack enlisted in the military, later saying that he was seeking those sorts of masculine social dynamics. He picked rapid deployments, serving in Panama, Desert Shield and Mogadishu, “trying to get it out of my system,” he says now. It didn’t work. He willed the masculine to the forefront of his character, but his mind flowered into adulthood in other ways. Later, divorce proceedings forced the contrast into starker standing. In his 30s, he began trundling down the road toward the transition: counseling, presentation (new clothes, new lifestyle), testosterone blockers, estrogen, pills to take care of that receding hairline, and ongoing networking among others walking the same path. One must live as the other gender for a certain amount of time before legally changing name and gender. Jack was on his way.

“Once you finally transition, you seem to be in your own right body — the body that you were meant to be in. There’s an elation, there’s happiness, there’s joy, until something like this happens,” Jack says.

***

After Jim Laule ran off the attackers, Cleveland police showed up at the corner of Clifton and West Boulevard and transported Zoerella and Jenny to the hospital. Zoerella was in desperate shape and seeing stars.

“MetroHealth was very transphobic,” Jack recalls. They were placed in what he calls a “closet-type room,” where he says they waited for 45 minutes to hear from a nurse. Another two hours passed before the doctor showed up. Meantime, Zoerella was bleeding all over the room, bleeding all over her clothes. Her head throbbed. Her nose jutted out from her face at a new angle.

As they left, the women asked the hospital to call the police back. They wanted an escort, for their safety. The staff refused, Jack recalls, pointing the ladies toward a pay phone downstairs.

“We were just robbed. We don’t have cellphones. We don’t have change. We don’t have money,” Jack says now, though the staff members at the hospital didn’t budge. (Metro spokesperson Tina Shaerban-Arundel says that the hospital does currently have a free phone in the main lobby for patients’ use.)

The women began walking. Their goal was the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center on Wade Oval, where Zoerella maintained relations as a veteran seeking PTSD therapy. “We walked through worse neighborhoods than where we got jumped,” Jack says. “I grabbed a stick, and she had a pipe.”

Along the way, they convinced a conductor along the Rapid’s Red Line to let them ride for free. At the VA, they went through a more rigorous checkup and were sent home. Jenny had worked through tears to convince her dad to pick them up. Sunrise was coming soon enough, and by then the women were changed completely.

It didn’t take long for Zoerella and Jenny to break up. These days, Jack doesn’t say much about that split. After the violence, there’s not much left to say.

“When we got jumped, I should have been able to defend us, but I just froze,” he says. “I went — I mean, everything — it’s just like when you go into shock in combat, everything goes into slow motion. You freeze. You can’t move. It’s like if you’ve ever had a really bad nightmare and you’re trying to scream, trying to wake yourself up. You want to do it, you’re telling yourself to do it, but nothing works.”

***

The city had been discussing a recent and ongoing wave of crime against the transgender community for several years when Scene first spoke with Jack. From assaults to murders and a breadth of legally sanctioned discrimination in between, Cleveland had been building up a cold front. This past summer’s Gay Games 9, an international sporting event held every four years in selected cities, presented a different reality than the one happening on the streets.

“It’s bridging. It’s not inclusive, but it’s bridging,” Zoë Lapin says of the dissonance among Cleveland’s approach to the LGBT community, something that isn’t talked about too much in the months since the Games. “After the [Gay Games] week was over, most if not all of the businesses had taken their flags down.”

The PR sheen wears thin among some in the community. Police spokespersons have denied a “pattern or trend” of crimes against the LGBT community, but the rate of attacks hasn’t diminished. Some make the papers; most don’t.

According to FBI statistics from 2007 to 2012, as reported by the Ohio Legislative Services Commission, crimes against people for their sexual orientation spiked from a low of 37 in 2010 to a high of 63 in 2012. Data on crimes specifically against transgender people in that time period have not been maintained. State legislation to get those transgender statistics — and related LGBT protections — on the books has fallen flat year after year.

In November 2013, Andrey Bridges was convicted of murdering Cemia Dove. Many in Cleveland’s transgender community believe that the prosecutor got the wrong guy. Transgender advocates tried to offer suspect names and information to the Cleveland Police Department, but that information was dismissed outright, activist Zoë Lapin says.

As court transcripts describe the case, Dove had visited Bridges at his Olmsted Township apartment for a date, and she was killed later that night. Two witnesses were also at the location, and Bridges told cops that one of them had murdered the woman. Bridges would be convicted despite his claims. And with a conviction, the story was brushed from the public purview.

Then, in December 2013, two transgender women were murdered in one 24-hour period in Cleveland. Betty Skinner and Brittany-Nicole Kidd-Stergis, shot to death on the east and west sides of town, respectively, suddenly vaulted onto the growing list of brutal hate crimes against the trans community. Delshawn Carroll, 19, was later convicted of murdering Brittany-Nicole and sentenced to 18-years-to-life in prison. It’s unclear what connection or motive tied Carroll to the murder. Police told reporters at the time that he had been identified through witness interviews. To date, Cleveland police have not confirmed any leads or suspects in the investigation of Betty’s death.

***

The problems are far from unique to Cleveland. In the past year alone, more than 200 transgender people have been murdered, often brutally and savagely, around the world. Black transgender women, like Brittany-Nicole in Cleveland, were the victims of 67 percent of all hate-motivated homicides of LGBT people last year, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. And as 2009 data from the Trans Murder Monitoring Project bears out, a transgender person is murdered every three days around the world. Brazil is something of an international epicenter, but weak legislation and pervading social discrimination maintain the trend in the U.S., as well.

Following the death of CeCe Dove, the Plain Dealer began a victim-smearing campaign, using phrases like “oddly dressed body” in place of “woman” to describe the brutal crime scene. LGBT groups initiated conversations about simple things like pronoun usage, but coverage of transgender crimes, already slim, seems to have dropped considerably since CeCe’s death.

“Where’s your care when someone who doesn’t look like you is laying dead?” Zoë Lapin asks to no one and everyone. “I don’t think there’s much journalistic integrity at the Plain Dealer. But what fun is that when you can just make money? Why help people in the community that you’re selling papers to?”

After the violence, after the shock, Zoerella Page got mad. A graduate of the Ohio Peace Officer Academy, she had been certified to carry an ASP baton. She also had several canisters of police-grade Mace on hand. She was headed back to war.

In the days and weeks following the assault, Zoerella went out into the streets, scouring the neighborhoods, trying to find the guys who had tried to kill her. She worked along Detroit and north toward ground zero, up and down Clifton and West Boulevard.

One night, outside the gas station near Clifton and Route 2, where Zoerella picked up cigarettes when she used to live in the neighborhood, she saw two of the guys from the attack buying something at the counter.

They looked at one another, and the guys knew exactly who they were looking at. Zoerella immediately borrowed a stranger’s cell phone to call the police. The two guys ran down Clifton toward Lakewood. According to Jack’s recollection of the night, the 911 operator hung up before any information could be traded.

The second time she called, a police car was promised. Thirty minutes passed. Forty minutes. An hour. No car. Zoerella called back twice more: “I’m here waiting and these guys are long gone.” Two hours later, police showed up at Zoerella’s house to explain that they might not be able to help on this one.

“Well, we’ll try to get ’em next time,” an officer told her.

“What do you mean next time? There are cameras at that gas station!” Turns out, of course, the cameras weren’t working.

The next few months became a blur. Zoerella routinely ran into men and women at bars along Detroit and West 117th Street who had their own horror stories. Assaults. Robberies. Rapes.

One of many: “This other guy got jumped right across the street [on Detroit Avenue]. There was this Arabic food store where the doors form an enclave. They pushed him into where the door is and they beat the living shit out of him.” Ask any transgender person in town; these stories are ubiquitous, but you won’t read about them in the paper.

The only news outlet that ran a piece on Zoerella and Jenny’s assault was Gay People’s Chronicle. The whole story flew further beneath the radar of both police and media, dropping off the planet quite literally within just a few weeks. Zoerella tried to get Fox 8 to run a story, but they wouldn’t touch it.

***

Zoerella Page couldn’t stay in Cleveland. She moved to Euclid for a short while, then spent three quiet years in Willoughby.

“If I were to come across a group of younger adults, I would get really nervous. I was in fear of something like that happening again,” Jack says now. “No words were said. No gestures or anything like that. But the presumed fear was always there. I isolated myself a lot, so I purposely didn’t put myself in situations where it could happen again.

“I was a hermit for a long time. I was just afraid to go out of the house.”

Zoerella lived as her female self until May 2014, when she dropped the hormone regimen and looked into the legal matters like name change, gender change — all the paperwork and all the personal effects. She walked backwards down the road she set out on three years prior, treading across similar processes: counseling, presentation (new clothes, new lifestyle again), cutting back on estrogen, reducing breast tissue into a male profile, and ongoing networking among others walking the same path.

The years leading up to that difficult decision were plagued with self-doubt and fear, the sort of constant wariness born on that walk across town after the assault.

Even when CeCe was murdered and her name seared across patently insensitive Plain Dealer headlines and across posters at rallies around town, Zoerella just couldn’t bear to be out in the world anymore. She mourned alone. In fact, she spent a lot of time alone before catching back up with an old high school friend named Michelle who she eventually began dating.

“The depression of what happened and the constant thought of being attacked again had me second-guessing if this is the way I want to live the rest of my life,” Jack says. “Do I want to isolate myself? Do I want to live in fear? Do I want to be afraid of who I thought I was? I mulled that around for a few months and then I got re-acquainted with Michelle. That was kind of the icing on the cake. Even though I felt that this was right for me, this was no longer feasible if I want to maintain a productive, social, happy life. I was tired of being afraid. I was tired of not being able to live — live — without being in fear constantly.”

PTSD reared its banal head at every turn. “I figured, what the hell, I’ll try anything just to live a normal life again. To get rid of that constant fear and constant just wanting to live as the person you are, even if it has to be in a different body, then I thought it would be worth it.”

His name, his gender: Everything returned to how things were pre-2011. Except now everything was different. Everything was bracketed as “after the violence.” Statistics vary on the phenomenon of transition regret, with research bearing out that only .5 to 5 percent of transgender people ever reverse the process. This takes place mostly among transgender women, due to the sorts of societal stigmas that beget violence. But detransitioning doesn’t mean that they are not transgender — it simply means that at that particular moment, finding a place in society where they can be accepted as their authentic selves is too difficult, too dangerous, and the price is too high.

Michelle told Zoerella not to detransition just for her. This had to be her own call. And despite the identity that felt so right in her mind, Zoerella made the decision. Sometimes, detransitioning from female back to male leaves a man permanently impotent or sterile. Jack, whose detransitioning process took several months, returned to life as a man with fewer complications than most. “I’m happy for that,” he says.

He popped the question in October. She said yes.

***

It was curious to Zoerella that the assault was never treated as a hate crime. In the police report, the very idea is dismissed — “No Bias NA,” the officer writes — even as the quote “What are you faggots doing in our neighborhood?” echoes three pages later.

“I guess, the way the laws were set out — it was almost as if they would have had to have said, ‘We’re going to kill you because you’re transgender,'” Jack says.

After Cleveland police nabbed 18-year-old Monolito Abernathy for a separate robbery case, Zoerella and Jenny were brought in to ID him on their assault. The police had popped at least one of the guys, they thought.

On Oct. 13, 2011, Abernathy pleaded not guilty to a six-charge indictment (three counts of first-degree felony aggravated robbery and three counts of second-degree felony assault). He was one of the guys who beat the hell out of Zoerella Page, the one who bashed her nose in with a brick, according to police records.

Cleveland police note in their initial report that there was no indication of hate-crime bias or gang relations in Abernathy’s crime. He was, however, presently associated with multiple charges of robbery. His modus operandi — the same set of strategies used by fellow suspect Johnathan Huff (who later pleaded out) — involved taking personal items from a victim, assaulting a victim, and forcing a victim “to lie down” on the ground.

“They treated the case like shit,” Jack says. “[The detective] basically gave up after the one guy pleaded out and they caught the other guy.”

One month later, after Abernathy pleaded not guilty — and this is something Jack would not find out until contacted by Scene in September 2014 — attorneys amended the indictment and altered one of the aggravated robbery charges to robbery, a second-degree felony. Abernathy pleaded guilty to one count of robbery, and prosecuting attorney Melissa Riley dropped the other five charges.

“They never told me,” Jack says.

Calls placed to assistant prosecutor Melissa Riley were not returned, though Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Joe Frolik got back to Scene and said that these sorts of plea deals are routine. And that’s true: Plea deals are part of an overwhelming number of county, state and federal prosecutions. Frolik says the county dropped so many of the criminal charges because that was the only way to guarantee jail time.

Abernathy was sentenced to four years at Lorain Correctional by Judge Ronald Suster. “Kind of sad you have to be doing this, disappointing your mother here,” the judge said drolly as he eyed Abernathy in the courtroom.

A few months later, Abernathy filed for judicial release, seeking probation. The county prosecutor opposed the release, but Suster granted it. Abernathy had served the mandatory time, he wrote. Within a few weeks, Suster retired from the bench.

Abernathy was ordered to pay Jack $6,927. The compensation trickled in via $20 spurts here and there. Recently, Jack endured a “six- to seven-month” stretch of nothing. The county’s not putting any pressure on him to pay up. In the eyes of the law — after bailing on the search for most of the involved suspects and dropping the charges against the primary arrested suspect — justice was served.

***

“We contribute and we deserve every right to live our life and live our truth,” Zoë Lapin says. She’s been building a case for human rights before Cleveland City Council. The meeting is going on three hours now. With a cross-section of lovers and haters in the City Hall audience, the day’s conversation hasn’t gone totally swimmingly.

The tone of some at the Plain Dealer only cast the debate into more unsettling waters: “I am not comfortable with a broad, gender-neutral bathroom ordinance that would make it easier for heterosexual men with criminal intent or just kinky habits to gain access to bathrooms used by women and children. And they are out there,” editorial writer Sharon Broussard wrote. The whole thing sounded pretty scary, but missed the point City Council members and residents like Zoë Lapin were talking about.

Editorial board colleague Peter Krouse echoed the sentiment: “I don’t think opening up all bathrooms to both sexes is the answer. That would deny people, males and females, the privacy they deserve and possibly put them in uncomfortable or compromising situations. It could also create a fertile environment for predators to strike.”

Readers had a field day in the worst sense of the phrase.

Such is the current climate in Cleveland and in major cities around the U.S. The debate over rights, as it were, is as divisive as they come. City Council’s ongoing discussion over restrooms hasn’t really gone anywhere, though some anti-discrimination amendments did pass out of committee on that November day. It’s a lengthy and circuitous process.

This December, about a month after the City Council hearing and about four months after the Gay Games and about three years after the violence, Jack is sitting on the second floor of the atrium at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center. He comes here weekly, never entirely forgetting the night he arrived with head reeling and blood spilling. Below, the room is energetic. People hustle in and out of the revolving doors, and at least once an hour a delivery person scuttles through, fresh flowers in hand, a note for a loved one scrawled with a sentiment everyone could use, one the whole city could use: Get well.

*****

1/5/15 statement from Dr. Henry Ng at MetroHealth Pride Clinic:

I’m deeply sorry the two individuals in the article felt poorly treated during their time at MetroHealth. We value diversity and are especially dedicated to the LGBT population through our work in the Pride Clinic. www.metrohealth.org/prideclinic

On behalf of MetroHealth, Dr. Van Auken and everyone else who work with me in the Pride Clinic, we will continue working hard to provide care sensitive to the health needs of the LGBT population. It’s important to know that you have allies in this health care system.

This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2014.