Koko Da Doll, Black Trans Sundance Star, Killed at Age 35

Koko Da Doll, the star of the Sundance hit documentary Kokomo City, was found murdered in Atlanta on Tuesday. She was 35.

According to the Atlanta Police Department, on Tuesday at 10:42 pm, officers responded to reports of a woman shot in the Westhaven neighborhood of Atlanta and found the victim was not “alert, conscious or breathing.”

“Homicide investigators responded to the scene and are working to determine the circumstances surrounding the incident,” the statement, which did not explicitly name Koko, read.

D. Smith, the music producer, and filmmaker who directed Kokomo City, confirmed Koko’s death in an Instagram post on Friday. “I created Kokomo City because I wanted to show the fun, humanized, natural side of Black trans women. I wanted to create images that didn’t show the trauma or the statistics of murder of Transgender lives,” Smith wrote. “I wanted to create something fresh and inspiring. I did that. We did that! But here we are again. It’s extremely difficult to process Koko’s passing, but as a team we are more encouraged now than ever to inspire the world with her story. To show how beautiful and full of life she was. She will inspire generations to come and will never be forgotten.”

Born Rasheeda Williams, Koko was one of the four stars of Kokomo City, along with fellow Black trans women Dominique Silver, Liyah Mitchell, and Daniella Carter. The film, which won two awards at Sundance when it premiered in January, follows the women’s lives in New York and Atlanta and documents “their love/hate relationships with cis men, their relationships to their own beauty, and the full array of attitudes that confront their lives on a daily basis,” according to Rolling Stone‘s review from earlier this year.

Koko’s death is one of three violent incidents involving transgender women in Atlanta within the past month, according to a post from the Atlanta Police Department. “While these individual incidents are unrelated, we are very aware of the epidemic-level violence black and brown transgender women face in America,” the APD said in a statement.

According to a Human Rights Campaign report issued last year, 32 transgender or nonbinary women were killed in the United States in 2022 alone, with at least 81 percent of the victims being people of color. One study has suggested that internationally, at least one transgender person is killed every three days. The last few years have also seen a steep rise in anti-LGBTQ legislation, with at least 467 anti-LGBTQ bills being tracked in the United States, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.