Transgender woman's remains go unclaimed for more than a year

TODAY, MANY will gather at LOVE Park to call attention to transgender issues.

It seems only right to call attention to something else:

The remains of a transgender woman who was brutally slain and dismembered in July 2013 have lay unclaimed for more than a year.

When I got the call, I thought there was no way that was true.

I knew Diamond Williams was estranged from many in her family. But when I talked to Williams' grandmother, Ruth Woods, shortly after the slaying, she said family members told her that they would take care of everything.

That was still her impression when I called yesterday.

"I did not know what they were going to do exactly. I did not know what you do under these circumstances," she said. "But I thought it was taken care of."

I wasn't sure what happened, either. But this I knew: Williams spent years battling drug addiction and selling her body to survive the only way she believed she could after being shunned by mainstream society and people she loved most.

I wanted to be sure that someone was going to do right by her.

In July 2013, police said 31-year-old Williams was killed and dismembered by Charles Sargent, a man who picked her up for sex. Sargent is accused of dumping her body parts, making seven trips and using borrowed tools, in a weedy lot on a desolate stretch of Old York Road in Hunting Park.

Woods, Williams' grandmother, called me after reading the initial stories. She had struggled to come to terms with Williams' life, she admitted. And now she was struggling to come to terms with her death and the unresolved shame and guilt and grief that came with it.

She wondered if she'd ever come to terms with it.

Woods hadn't confided in many people about the death, but she watched the case from afar. Before Sargent's preliminary hearing last week, she called to say she was considering going to court. But she called later to say she changed her mind.

"I'm just not ready," she told me.

I partly expected she would not be ready to deal with the latest news. But I was wrong.

"Somewhere I have to get the strength to step up," she said.

Woods said she'd call the Coroner's Office to ask about claiming the remains and cremation.

But she still was torn about what to do with the ashes.

Did they belong with her, who knew and loved Williams as Mark William Woods?

Or with those who knew and loved Williams as Diamond?

"Do you think they would want them?" she asked of Diamond's friends in the city's transgender community.

A little later Woods called back. She would claim the ashes.

"I'm going to bring him home," she said.

Phone: 215-854-5943

On Twitter: @NotesFromHel