A legendary South Beach drag queen, Wanda, aka Miss Wanda, lost her life on Tuesday night in Tampa when she was gunned down after answering the door at a friend’s home.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Wanda, 49, whose real name was Anthony Jerome Lee, was cooking dinner for a friend at their home on East Genesee Street when someone knocked on the door. When Wanda opened the door, she was shot five times by a gunman.
A nearby neighbor, Jeremy Judkins, told Fox 13 News that he heard Wanda’s friend, (a woman with a medical condition whom he’d been helping out) screaming after hearing the gunshots.
“You could hear her screaming, so we went in the house. We saw her but we didn’t know that when we went in the kitchen, we were going to see the guy,” said Judkins.
“It was real tragic. There was blood everywhere. It was real tragic,” Judkins said. “I was up all night about it because I saw him fighting for his breath, like we were trying to help get him to breathe before the police came.”
Police haven’t named any suspects, but they do believe that Wanda was not the intended target for the murder, saying the suspects were probably targeting someone else who they believed would be at the house.
Hamburger Mary’s, a Ybor City bar where Wanda had been performing weekly. The bar will be hosting a fundraiser to help pay for funeral costs.
Though this hasn’t been classified as a hate crime, this isn’t the first time that a member of the LGBT community has been the victim of violence. Check out some other horrible attacks below. –nicholas robinson
