GREELEY, COLO. — To her sister, Angie Zapata was a teenage girl in every sense but the biological one.
She spent hours spraying her long hair into compliance with Aqua Net, painting her eyelashes with L'Oreal and her skin with Cover Girl. She combed discount stores for clothes that would emphasize her curves.
The effect was stunning. When the 18-year-old visited the store where her older sister, Monica, worked, men would make excuses to hover.
"This is my brother, Justin," Monica would tell them, "and my wannabe sister, Angie."
Always they were shocked, but often accepting, Monica said. Still, she felt uneasy for Angie, who had endured taunts since she was a little boy who begged to use her sister's lip gloss.
"I worried about her all the time," said Monica, 33, of Brighton, Colo.
In July, her fears proved valid. Concerned when she had not heard from Angie for several days, Monica went to her Greeley apartment and found her battered body on the floor.
Authorities say the killer beat her to death after learning she was a man, and later told police that he thought he'd killed "it."
Activists say Allen Ray Andrade's trial, which began last week in Weld County, marks one of the first times in the United States that the homicide of a transgender victim is being prosecuted as a hate crime.
Though a number of states have hate-crime laws that include protections based on sexual orientation, Colorado is one of 11 states, along with the District of Columbia, whose statutes also include gender identity as a protected class. However, prosecutors and activists say such laws have never been applied in Colorado -- and rarely elsewhere in the nation.
One high-profile case was that of Gwen Araujo, a 17-year-old Newark, Calif., transgender woman, who was beaten and strangled in 2002 after two men with whom she'd had sex learned she was biologically male. They were convicted of second-degree murder but not of a hate crime. Two others were sentenced for manslaughter.
Saying the Angie Zapata case underscores the dangers that transgender people face, activists recently launched a statewide ad campaign featuring the crime and promoting a federal hate-crimes law.
"We wanted to start a conversation," said Rashad Robinson, spokesman for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. "It's also about humanizing Angie and letting people know about her life."
