Trans Woman, Accused of Threats, Freed from Jail

A transgender San Francisco woman who allegedly wielded a screwdriver at her husband and threatened to kill him has been released from jail after admitting to violating her probation.

Precious Rae Jean Luvlee, 44, was already on probation when she was jailed in April after her husband accused her of threatening him at the Tenderloin smoke shop where he works, in the 800 block of Geary Street.

Luvlee's release also follows rallying by supporters and comes as the sheriff's department examines its policies around transgender inmates.

At the smoke shop, Luvlee's husband, who's 32 and whose first language is Arabic, said that he'd agreed to let Luvlee borrow his car to visit her family, but then she'd changed her mind and, looking "crazy," told him, "I don't want it."

She left, then soon came back and "started screaming really loud in the street. I don't know what was going on with her," said her husband, who responded to most of a reporter's questions about the April 25 incident through an interpreter.

He went outside to speak with her, but she was holding "a big screwdriver" over her head "and she wanted to hack me," he said. "... I got really confused."

Luvlee told him, "I want to kill you motherfucker," he said. Another man grabbed him, brought him back into the shop, and "blocked [her] way" as she came toward him, still screaming, he said.

Then, Luvlee told him, "I will send my people to kick your ass" and she "started calling people on the phone."

"I got scared and called the police," her husband, who didn't want his name published, said.

Luvlee, whose next court date is July 1, didn't respond to interview requests.

The man who interpreted for her husband expressed animosity toward Luvlee, insisting on using male pronouns for her. However, he said that her husband used feminine pronouns.

Prosecutors filed a motion April 27 to revoke Luvlee's probation, and she was held on $150,000 bail. Rather than file new charges, the district attorney's office moved to revoke her probation, a common practice.

After she admitted the violation May 12, she was allowed to continue under several conditions, including that she stay 25 feet away from her husband, submit to 30 days of electronic monitoring, and participate in 26 anger management counseling sessions, court records say. Once she's completed 13 sessions, the court will consider terminating the remainder. She was released from jail later that day.

In a motion for Luvlee to be released on her own recognizance or for her bail to be reduced, Deputy Public Defender Hien Ngoc Nguyen said Luvlee met her husband in December 2015. They got married in March, but they don't live together.

Pointing to supportive letters from Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project, a nonprofit where Luvlee volunteers, and others, Nguyen said she "is beloved, appreciated, and known by countless community members as a kind, charitable, non-violent woman."

Nguyen also referred to the fact that Luvlee has missed some court dates in the past. He said that those "were from before she secured stable housing with the [homeless] Navigation Center's help" at a single-room occupancy hotel on Geary Street close to the shop where her husband works.

He also said that Luvlee doesn't have "prior violent allegations or history," and that police in the current case didn't find any screwdriver. No video surveillance footage has been provided of the April incident, he added.

In the case that originally resulted in her three-year probation sentence, Luvlee was charged in September 2014 with second-degree commercial burglary of a Money Mart, possession of a completed monetary document, identity theft, and false personation, all felonies, according to the complaint.

She also faced allegations including committing a felony while on bail. The complaint says that she'd previously been convicted of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud, forgery of a legal bill or monetary document, and forgery of a document. The earliest of those incidents occurred in 2003 in Santa Barbara County.

The September 2014 complaint was eventually amended to include a felony forgery charge. In April 2015, she pleaded guilty to the forgery charge in exchange for the other counts, to which she'd pleaded not guilty, being dismissed, according to court records, which also list her name as Reginald T. Lee.

Supporters

In a news release last week announcing a May 12 rally outside the Hall of Justice, 850 Bryant Street, where Luvlee was being held and where she was set to appear in court, her supporters said she should be released on her own recognizance and that the sheriff's department should "immediately implement a housing policy centering [around] gender self-determination." The agency has been working to move female transgender inmates into housing with cis women.

Luvlee, who's black, had been jailed after "she told her abusive husband she was annulling their marriage and he called the police to revoke her probation," her supporters stated.

Vanessa Warri, recruiter and facilitator of the Sheroes Project at UCSF's Center of Excellence for Transgender Health, asked in the release whether Luvlee would have been jailed "if she were rich? If she were white? If she wasn't trans?"

Luvlee's husband said that since the incident, he's thought about divorce, but his lawyer said maybe they could still "fix the relationship."

"I married her for love," he said. "I feel love for her."

He also said that she'd proposed to him. He believes she married him for money, and he said that he owes his bank $800 to cover checks she wrote.

At one point, he said, Luvlee had brought him paperwork for a divorce, but it didn't look legitimate, and Luvlee had admitted to faking it.

In their announcement for last week's rally, Luvlee's supporters criticized the sheriff's department for "transphobia" and other problems.

Sheriff's Actions

The sheriff's department has been making plans to stop housing trans inmates based on their gender assigned at birth. Recently, trans women who are in custody were moved from their unit in County Jail #4, a men's facility, to County Jail #2, which holds men and women. They're still not integrated into the women's population, but Sheriff Vicki Hennessy "is committed to doing it, and it is the focus of a great deal of work," Eileen Hirst, Hennessy's chief of staff, said Tuesday.

One challenge, Hirst said, is that the national Prison Rape Elimination Act "has a specific guideline about people being searched by deputies of the gender with which they identify. We will need to write the policy that goes along with that," then meet with union officials and train deputies.

Hirst also addressed allegations that emerged in March that staff had made anti-trans comments to inmates, who at the time were still being held in the men's jail. In March, an inmate had said Deputy McDowell, whose first name hasn't been disclosed, had been particularly problematic. Hirst had confirmed then that an investigation was underway.

Tuesday, she said, "What we found when we actually interviewed everybody in the housing unit was that they had heard that he said things. They had not heard him say them. ... No one told us that they had a direct experience of his using transphobic slurs."

That "does not mean that it wasn't hurtful to them to have heard" the allegations, Hirst added, "but there was no one who had the direct experience of hearing it" from the deputy.

The investigation did uncover "some issues that are consistent with housing transgender prisoners, particularly transgender women, in a facility that is all male," she said. A prime example is underwear.

"There was not sufficient appropriate underwear" for the trans inmates. Now that they've been moved to another jail, even though the inmates still "are not in a women's housing unit ... the appropriate and appropriately sized underwear is available" to them, Hirst said.