Sam Nordquist’s Death Highlights Violence Against Black Trans Men – Capital B

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Sam Nordquist craved romance. So, last September, he traveled to New York from his home in Oakdale, Minnesota, to meet his online girlfriend. A few months later, he was dead.
On Feb. 13, human remains believed to be those of the 24-year-old Black transgender man (some outlets say that Nordquist identified as biracial) were found in a field around 50 miles outside of Rochester. He had been subjected to abuse and torture — punching, kicking, striking — for weeks before his death, according to law enforcement.
Police caution against speculating about the motives of the five people who have been charged with second-degree murder with depraved indifference, noting that they’ve yet to find evidence that the killing was a hate crime. LGBTQ advocacy and support groups argue that, regardless of whether the police file hate crime charges, what happened was “a hateful act.”
Nordquist’s brutal death, which one police officer described as “one of the most horrific crimes” she’s investigated over the course of her 20 years in law enforcement, has led to a flood of grief and anger among LGBTQ Americans. Black activists say that it’s hard to hear about the tragedy and not be reminded of the violence that LGBTQ Americans have long been confronted with — violence that too often gets overlooked when it’s aimed at Black transgender men.
“Sam should be alive today,” Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ rights group, told Capital B in a statement. “Our transgender siblings, and particularly the BIPOC trans community, are facing threats from every direction, and the discriminatory policies and hateful rhetoric we see from leaders at the highest levels lead to real-world violence.”
Robinson was commenting on the anti-transgender actions that the White House has been leaning into ever since Donald Trump returned to power in January.
After taking office, Trump signed executive orders seeking to erase the very idea of gender identity, ban transgender troops from openly serving in the military, and restrict gender-affirming care for youth. In response to that first order, the National Parks Service removed all transgender references from its web pages on the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, a turning point in LGBTQ rights history in which Black transgender activists including Marsha P. Johnson played a major role.
“Trans people are our family, our friends, our neighbors. They deserve to live their lives with dignity and joy, without fear of violence and hate. We will never stop fighting for our trans siblings,” Robinson said.
At least 32 transgender people were killed in the U.S. in 2024, with Black transgender people being particularly vulnerable to this violence, per the Human Rights Campaign. And while only 0.5% of U.S. adults and 1.4% of U.S. youth identify as transgender, the FBI found that, in 2023, 4.1% of hate crimes were motivated by gender identity.
David Johns, the executive director of the National Black Justice Collective, a civil rights organization dedicated to empowering Black LGBTQ Americans, echoed some of Robinson’s sentiments, underscoring that Nordquist’s killing calls to mind the rigid hierarchies afflicting LGBTQ communities.
“Trans men — especially trans men of color, especially Black trans men — often don’t get equitable treatment from law enforcement or the media,” he told Capital B, referring to the bias that certain groups face when it comes to receiving attention. “Sam’s name will now be on a long scroll of folks remembered during vigils for Trans Day of Remembrance. What I’m also thinking about at this moment is that there are others in our community who are missing or have been murdered whose names we don’t know — and might never know, because of how reporting these crimes works.”
Tee Arnold, Banko Brown, and Tony McDade are just three other Black transgender men who have been killed in recent years.
Johns is heartened by the fact that Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has directed state police to lend all possible support to the investigation, including into whether Nordquist’s death was a hate crime. Activists have long been frustrated by prosecutors not bringing hate crime charges in cases involving the deaths of LGBTQ Americans.
Under New York’s state penal code, hate crimes are offenses done “in whole or in substantial part because of a belief or perception regarding the race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, gender identity or expression, religion, religious practice, age, disability, or sexual orientation of a person regardless of whether the belief or perception is correct.”
The tragedy, Johns added, draws his thoughts to the 1998 murders of Matthew Shepard, who was gay, and James Byrd Jr., who was Black, that eventually led to the signing of a landmark anti-hate crime law in 2009 by President Barack Obama.
“Their lives also were stolen,” he said.
As the search for justice continues, Nordquist’s family and friends have been gathering to honor his memory, saying that he was a big fan of cooking, Puma sweatsuits, and TikTok — and that he simply desired affection.
“That’s all Sam ever wanted,” his mother, Linda Nordquist, told Syracuse.com on Monday, “was to be loved and to be in a relationship.”
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Brandon Tensley is Capital B's national politics reporter. More by Brandon Tensley
Capital B is a Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organization reporting for Black communities across the country.