Dylan Gurley, a transgender woman from Little Elm, Texas, was just a few weeks shy of her 21st birthday when police found her unconscious in a Denton, Texas, home late last month.
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph, police arrived at the home a little after 11 p.m. on July 23, where they found Gurly with “traumatic injuries.” Gurley was transported to Medical City Denton, where she died roughly 40 minutes later. The Tarant Country Medical Examiner’s case records indicate that the cause of death was “blunt and sharp force injuries with strangulation.”
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People who knew Gurley told the Denton Record-Chronicle that she had been experiencing homelessness around the time of her senseless, untimely death. Little else has been reported about the murder, but police told the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph on August 1 that the investigation is ongoing. No arrests or suspects have been reported. Police are asking anyone with information about the crime to call 940-349-7977 or report tips anonymously at DentonCountyCrimeStoppers.com.
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An online obituary lists Gurley’s mother and father, stepparents, grandparent, three sisters, and three brothers as her surviving relatives, as well as many other family members and friends.
Gurley’s sister, Senica Ciarallo, has set up a GoFundMe campaign asking for donations to help the family “give Dylan the memorial she wanted and deserved.” Ciarallo wrote that the family hopes to buy urns and bracelets or necklaces for Gurley’s ashes. They are also planning an event to mark what would have been Gurley’s 21st birthday on August 18.
“We are just trying to put the pieces back together as best as we can and appreciate any and all help,” Ciarallo wrote.
According to Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents, Gurley is one of 24 trans and gender-expansive people who have died by violence in the U.S. this year and one of four who were killed in July alone. But as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) frequently notes, the violent deaths of trans and gender-nonconforming people often go unreported and victims are frequently misgendered and misidentified by police, so this may only be a snapshot of the violence inflicted upon the trans community. According to the HRC, Gurley was misgendered in some media reports, and the Tarant Country Medical Examiner’s case records list her sex as “male.”
Additionally, Tori Cooper, Director of Community Engagement for the HRC’s Transgender Justice Initiative, noted that Gurley is at least the fifth transgender person to be murdered while experiencing homelessness in 2024. “This is tragically not a coincidence,” Cooper wrote in a statement. “Studies show that 30% of transgender individuals have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, which further endangers them and puts them in the path of fatal violence.”
In its statement memorializing Gurley, the HRC also noted that Texas has seen more anti-trans murders than any state in the U.S. Gurley’s is the 36th murder of a trans person in the state since the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization started tracking fatal violence against trans people in 2013, with transgender woman accounting for all but one of those 36 victims.
“Dylan deserved safety while she was alive,” the HRC’s Cooper wrote, “and now she deserves justice.”
