Violence in Boston, the victim services nonprofit, is holding a candlelight vigil and rally on Thursday, May 6, in Hopkinton, to raise awareness and call for more investigation into last month’s death of Mikayla Miller.
Miller, a 16-year-old LGBTQ young woman with a promising future, was found dead in the woods near her home in Hopkinton on April 18. Organizers of Thursday’s vigil and rally describe Miller as an athlete and honors students, with dreams of studying journalism in college, a loving daughter, a little sister, a niece, a cousin and a friend, and who identified as LGBTQIA.
The police told her family it was a suicide. However, reports the Boston Globe today, “In the face of near silence from the police and the DA’s office, rumors about how a young Black girl ended up dead in the woods in a nearly all-white town have ricocheted across Hopkinton and beyond.”
“Accusations of a lynching, a racially motivated beating, and a police cover-up have sped across social media. Calvina Strothers, Miller’s mother, has raised questions about whether the death was actually a suicide,” the Globe reports.
Miller’s mother, reports the Globe, “said that her daughter was attacked on April 17 by five white teenagers, fallout from a fight Miller had with her girlfriend.” Family and community advocates are pressing for more answers to how this incident may be connected with Miller’s death.
“Regarding the notion that this office has in some way neglected Mikayla’s case, or worse . . . engaged in some sort of cover-up because Mikayla was Black, or because she was a member of the LGBTQI community — that is patently false,” Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan told the Globe.
The vigil and rally are being planned by former Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson and Violence in Boston’s founding CEO Monica Cannon-Grant.
Read the complete Globe story here. Details on the vigil and rally on the event’s Facebook page.
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