Staff at a facility for abused women and children unknowingly sheltered a transgender woman for weeks before she stabbed a warden so viciously her ‘internal organs were exposed’, police say.
Michelle Silva Perez was offered a place at Shepherd’s Gate in Greenville, South Carolina, less than four miles from a men’s shelter also run by Miracle Hill Ministries.
The 36-year-old had been evicted the evening before for ‘not following the guidelines of the facility’ but returned on July 18 armed with a sword before nearly disemboweling a staffer called Kirby.
‘We found out last night that this attacker, who had been a resident at Shepherd’s Gate for a few weeks, was in fact a male,’ Miracle Hill Ministries CEO Ryan T. Duerk said in a statement that night.
‘Let me assure you that we did not know this or suspect it, and Shepherd’s Gate followed all their procedures for intake appropriately.’
Michelle Silva Perez was offered a place at Shepherd’s Gate in Greenville, South Carolina, less than four miles from a men’s shelter also run by Miracle Hill Ministries
The 36-year-old had been evicted the evening before for ‘not following the guidelines of the facility’ but returned on July 18 armed with a sword
Police were called at 11am when witnesses reported seeing saw Perez push the woman to the ground before stabbing her in the torso.
The victim was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery where she remains in a stable condition.
Witnesses reported seeing saw Perez push the woman to the ground before stabbing her in the torso
Perez was arrested at the scene and has been charged with attempted murder and possession of a weapon during a violent crime’.
She was denied bond during a hearing last week and is currently being held at Greenville County Jail where she has been booked in as a male.
Lieutenant Ryan Flood of the Greenville County Sheriff’s Department said she is ‘in isolation because she is still transitioning to being a woman’.
The case echoes that of Harvey Marcelin, 84, who identifying as a transgender lesbian when she murdered Susan Leyden, 68, in the women’s section of a New York homeless shelter in 2022.
He had already been convicted of two previous homicides by the time he was admitted to the Sage Center at Stonewall House in Brooklyn where he was filmed stuffing Leyden’s headless torso into a garbage bag and dumping it in a shopping cart.
Separate store surveillance footage recorded Marcelin sitting on a severed human leg in his electric wheelchair.
Last week it emerged that a transgender murderer who pleaded to be moved to a female prison because she was suffering ‘chronic diarrhea’ and stress had her request denied by a federal judge.
Michelle Renee Lamb, 83, is serving three consecutive life sentences for abducting two women, strangling one to death and leaving her naked body in a field in 1969.
She is currently being held at the Topeka Correctional Facility in Kansas, having moved from a men’s prison in January 2023 when she had gender-affirming surgery.
‘I also suffered frequent bouts of diarrhea. This was never a problem until I was put into this hateful environment,’ Lamb – who previously identified as Thomas – said in the handwritten lawsuit.
Harvey Marcelin, left, had already killed two women by the time he was admitted to the women’s section of a New York homeless shelter where he murdered Susan Leyden in 2022
US District Judge John Lungstrum dismissed the case because Lamb failed to show she was being discriminated against, reported The Topeka Capital-Journal.
‘Plaintiff has not shown that her housing assignment subjects her to atypical and significant hardship in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life,’ Lungstrum wrote.
Duerk said that staff at the Shepherd’s Gate center in Greenville had no reason to believe that Perez was transitioning before they granted her shelter, and said she would have been dealt with ‘differently’ had they known.
‘All documentation was provided to ensure this individual was a viable candidate to stay in our women’s facility,’ he wrote.
‘This is a terribly unfortunate series of events that we will learn and adapt from.’
