Pebbles LaDime Doe (left) was murdered by Daqua Lameek Ritter. He was found guilty and is now serving a life sentence. Credit: Social media composite
On October 17, Daqua Lameek Ritter was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a black transgender woman. The 26-year-old South Carolina man was finally sentenced after being convicted in February for shooting and killing Pebbles LaDime Doe on August 4, 2019.
Doe was shot by Ritter three times with a .22 caliber handgun. The murder occurred after Doe was lured to a remote location some distance from where she lived in Allendale. When word of their relationship, which was kept secret by Ritter, was assumedly at risk of becoming public knowledge, he took her life.
Ritter had been seeing Doe, starting from one of his many visits to spend time with family outside of New York, according to the testimonies of Doe’s close friends. Text messages that prosecutors were able to retrieve from Doe’s mobile phone found ongoing arguments pushing her to delete all of their texts, although hundreds remained from the month before her death.
Adding to Ritter’s demand for secrecy was another girlfriend at the time, Delasia Green. Upon finding out about Ritter and Doe’s affair, Green reportedly insulted him with a homophobic slur.
Prosecutors asked for a life sentence without parole, while Ritter’s defense lawyers requested a ruling that would give their defendant the ability to be back on the streets someday. At press time no confirmation on either request was available, but the story will be updated as further information is released.
South Carolina State law enforcement’s inaction of processing a gunshot residue test Ritter had voluntarily taken meant that there was little to no physical evidence pointing to the defendant. The defense also argued that, based on the frequent car rides the pair took together, their intimate relationship, and other positive exchanges between the two over texts presented a different picture altogether.
As part of their presentation at trial, prosecutors showed off body camera footage from a traffic stop performed the day of the murder that included not only Doe, but a figure in the passenger seat with a distinctive left-wrist tattoo. The stop was performed just a few hours before police discovered Doe slumped forward in the car, parked in a driveway.
In police interviews with Ritter, he claimed he had not seen Doe on the day her body was found but the police body camera footage showed that the tattoo seen during the traffic stop belonged to Ritter, which confirmed he was lying to police and would have been one of the last people likely to have seen Doe that day.
Xavier Pinckney, Ritter’s co-defendant, was sentenced earlier in 2024 to three years and nine months for the act of lying to investigators about what he knew of Ritter and Doe’s final interactions.
Ritter’s case is a historic one, because it is the first guilty verdict in a trial since the passing of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Put into law in 2009, the act was written in the wake of Shepard, a gay student in Wyoming, and Byrd, a Black father of three from Texas, were murdered in 1998. The federal definition of hate crimes was expanded through the act to include gender, disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division had this to say in a statement on Thursday night: “This sentencing sends a clear message. We will use all the resources at our disposal to safeguard the rights of the LGBTQI+ community, and we will investigate and prosecute perpetrators of transphobic-fueled violence in our country.”
FBI Civil Rights Unit Supervisory Special Agent Anthony Snead, Jr. also commented on the sentence, as part of a press release put out on Thursday. “We want members of the LGBTQIA+ community to feel heard and to feel comfortable being who they are, because no one should be victimized for being who they are.”