This article is a partnership between The Fuller Project and The New York Times Magazine. At 26, Jennifer Laude was full of joy, her friends said.
She was fearless and beautiful, her sister added. She was a generous daughter, according to her mother. And she died shortly after 11 p.m.
on Oct. 11, 2014, in a motel room in Olongapo, a port city about 100 miles north and west of Manila in the Philippines, at the hands of an American she had met earlier that evening at a nightclub, a Marine who was in the country for joint military exercises.
After discovering that Laude was transgender, Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton, who was 19 at the time, choked her and pushed her head into a toilet bowl until she drowned.