A love affair unraveled before a Black transgender woman was fatally shot in rural South Carolina

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A black transgender woman and the man she was secretly dating had just been apprehended in rural South Carolina. Dime Doe, the driver, was concerned. She already had points on her driver’s license and didn’t want another ticket to keep her from getting behind the wheel. Daqua Lameek Ritter, whom she affectionately called “my husband,” often relied on her for rides.

Everything seemed to work out fine: Doe texted her mother that afternoon saying she had gotten a $72 ticket, but it was “fine.”

Hours later, police found her slumped in the driver’s seat of her car, parked in a driveway along a remote road. Her death on August 4, 2019 is now the subject of the nation’s first federal trial on an alleged hate crime based on gender identity, which began Tuesday.

Much of what happened in the approximately two and a half hours between the last time Doe was seen and the discovery of her body remains unclear. But as prosecutors wrap up their case this week, more details are emerging about the covert connection between 24-year-old Doe — remembered by friends as an outspoken party lover with long eyelashes and blunt bob haircuts — and Ritter, a man whose signature tattoo on the left wrist was captured on body camera footage of the traffic stop.

The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that Ritter fatally shot Doe to prevent further disclosure of their affair in a small rural town where the rumor mill was already churning. Text exchanges between the two show Ritter trying to dispel gossip about the dalliance in the weeks leading up to Doe’s death. He also followed the investigation into her murder while timidly answering his longtime girlfriend’s questions, according to testimony given during the trial.

It was no secret that Doe had begun her social transition as a woman shortly after graduating high school in Allendale, South Carolina—a city of 8,000, according to testimony from her close friends. Doe started dressing in skirts, getting her nails done and wearing extensions. She and her friends went out drinking. They discussed the boys they saw.

One of those boys was Ritter, who came from New York to stay with his grandmother in Allendale for the summer. Doe and Ritter began to grow closer over the course of those visits, giving Delasia Green — Ritter’s long-term girlfriend in the summer of 2019 — a “gut feeling” that something was going on.

Ritter initially told Green that he and Doe were cousins, the girlfriend testified this week. But one day she found messages on his phone from an unsaved number talking about “getting a room.” She assumed they were Doe’s.

When Green confronted Ritter, he became upset and told her not to question his sexuality, she said.

Yanna Albany, Doe’s cousin, testified that she, too, had a relationship with Ritter that summer, but ended it after about three weeks when Doe told her she was also seeing him. Albany said that when she broke up with Ritter, he turned red, threatened to hit Doe for “laying on him” and used a homophobic slur.

Nevertheless, Doe’s relationship with Ritter appeared to grow stronger after the entanglement, Albany said. Other friends said Doe never talked about any drama between the two.

Still, texts obtained by the FBI suggest that Ritter tried to keep their connection hidden as much as possible. He would remind Doe to delete their communications from her phone, and the majority of the hundreds of text messages sent in the month before her death were deleted.

Shortly before Doe’s death, the text messages began to become tense. In a July 29, 2019 post, she complained that Ritter did not reciprocate her generosity toward him. He responded that he thought they understood she didn’t need the “extra stuff.” He also told her that Green had recently insulted him with a homophobic slur. In a July 31 text message, Doe said she felt used and that Ritter’s girlfriend should never have found out.

Ritter’s lawyers said the sample of messages introduced by the prosecutor represented only a “snapshot” of their exchanges. They pointed to a July 18 text in which Doe encouraged Ritter, and another conversation in which Ritter thanked Doe for one of her many kindnesses.

But witnesses have provided other potentially damning testimony against Ritter.

On the day Doe died, a group of friends saw the defendant driving away in a silver car with tinted windows — a vehicle that Ritter’s acquaintance Kordell Jenkins testified he had seen Doe drive before. When Ritter returned to play cards several hours later, Jenkins said he was wearing a new outfit and looked “tense.” It was a buggy summer day and the group of four started building a fire in a barrel to smoke out the mosquitoes.

At one point, Ritter emptied his book bag into the barrel, Jenkins testified. He said he could not see the contents but assumed they were items Ritter no longer wanted, possibly the clothes he had worn earlier that day.

When the two encountered each other the next day, Jenkins said he could see the silver handle of a small firearm sticking out of the waist of Ritter’s pants. He said Ritter asked him to “get it away.”

Defense attorneys argued that it was ridiculous to think Ritter would ask someone he barely knew to dispose of an alleged murder weapon.

But shortly after Doe died, Allendale was abuzz with rumors that Ritter had killed her.

Green testified that when he showed up at her cousin’s house in Columbia later that week, he was dirty, smelled and couldn’t stop pacing. Her cousin’s boyfriend gave Ritter a ride to the bus stop, presumably so he could return to New York. Before he left, Green asked him if he killed Doe.

“He lowered his head and gave me a little grin,” Green said.

According to FBI Special Agent Clay Trippi, Ritter followed the fallout of Doe’s death from New York, citing Facebook messages between Ritter and an Allendale friend, Xavier Pinckney. On August 11, Pinckney told Ritter that no one was “really talking,” which Trippi said he took as a reference to the lack of cooperation with police.

But on August 14, Pinckney warned Ritter to stay away from Allendale because he had been visited by state police. Later he said someone was “snitching.”

Trippi testified that his sources never saw Ritter in Allendale again in the summers after Doe’s death.

In January 2023, federal officials charged Ritter with a “hate crime for the murder of a transgender woman because of her gender identity,” using a firearm in connection with the hate crime and obstruction of justice. They also accused Pinckney of obstruction of justice and said he made false and misleading statements.

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Pollard is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.