Episode
Did a Viral Video lead to her Death? The Muhlaysia Booker Case
- Podcast
- TRUE CRIME with Bratterstein
- Published
- May 25, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3681
- Processing state
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Summary
As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Muhlaysia Booker with me today. In 2019, 22‑year‑old Muhlaysia Booker, a Black transgender woman in Dallas, briefly survived one act of shocking public violence only to be killed weeks later in another. In April, after a minor traffic accident at an apartment complex, a crowd gathered as men dragged her across a parking lot and brutally beat her while bystanders filmed; the video went viral, and Booker later described how they hurled anti‑LGBTQ slurs as they punched and kicked her, turning her into a symbol of the dangers faced by Black trans women in the US. Just a month later, in May 2019, police found her lying face down in a Dallas street near Tenison Park, dead from gunshot wounds, and investigators eventually linked her killing to 37‑year‑old Kendrell Lyles, who was also suspected in other murders around the same time. Prosecutors said phone records and witness accounts placed Booker in Lyles’s car shortly before her death, and although authorities did not publicly label the murder as a hate crime, her family and advocates saw it as part of a wider pattern of lethal anti‑trans hostility. In 2023, on the eve of trial, Lyles pleaded guilty to murdering Booker and was sentenced to 48 years in prison, as her relatives faced him in court and described how she had been trying to rebuild her life after the filmed beating when she was killed.