In the midst of the investigation, Lorrain’s supervisor attended a conference on identifying hate crimes and victims’ rights.
#JOSHUA VALLUM FULL#
Carroll is an officer with the Ocean Springs Police Department in Mississippi and is assigned full time to the FBI Safe Streets Task Force. Vallum later told Task Force Officer Jonathan Carroll the same story in an interview, shortly after he surrendered to law enforcement. He lied and said he didn’t know Williamson was a male until they became intimate, and then he snapped and killed her in a fit of rage.
Vallum told gang members about the killing the next day. Responding officers found Williamson’s body in the woods and later contacted the FBI. His family called local police after Vallum entered the house covered in blood. They drove to his father’s house in Lucedale, Mississippi, and he brutally attacked her, stabbing her with a knife and beating her with a hammer. On May 30, 2015, Vallum drove to Alabama to find Williamson and convinced her to get in his car. “Vallum told the other guy he would ‘handle the business,’ ” Lorrain said. At that point, Vallum had two options: he could flee or save face with the gang by killing Williamson. Vallum stopped seeing Williamson, but another gang member confronted him, Lorrain said. According to the gang, that made Vallum a homosexual, a violation of gang rules that meant he could be killed on sight. The two met through social media in 2014 and had a sexual relationship for several months. Investigators quickly determined that then-27-year-old Vallum likely killed Williamson because she was transgender. “It was a horrible murder,” said FBI Special Agent Jerome Lorrain, who coordinates task force members from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. The FBI’s Safe Streets Task Force in Pascagoula, Mississippi (part of the FBI’s Jackson Division), investigated the murder because it was initially believed to be gang related: Vallum was a local “enforcer” and a national secretary of the Almighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation gang. The act has been successfully applied to other hate crimes, but this is the first time it has been used for a transgender victim. The Shepard-Byrd Act gives the FBI authority to investigate violent hate crimes, including violence directed at the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community, and enables the prosecution of such crimes at the federal level.
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