Tioni Theus was 16, a straight-A student who loved dance and golf, when her body was found on the Manchester Avenue on-ramp of the 110 Freeway in South Los Angeles in January 2022. She had been shot. Nearly five years later, no one has been publicly arrested for killing her.
Her case is the clearest face of a pattern Los Angeles has measured and not fixed. Black women are under 5% of the city’s population, but 158 of the 481 women murdered in Los Angeles between January 2011 and August 2022 were Black, about 33%, according to an equity analysis by the city’s Civil Rights Department, built on LAPD data. The same report found Black women were 28.2% of the women reported missing over the two years it examined.
The City Council ordered that analysis after Tioni’s family and Black Angelenos spent weeks pressing officials to treat her death as the emergency it was. Councilmembers Curren Price and Marqueece Harris-Dawson introduced the motion. When the findings reached a council committee in March 2023, the department’s executive director, Capri Maddox, said: “We will not let them suffer in silence. This data provides unequivocal proof of this crisis.”
The report asked for three things: prevention programs for women of color, steady funding for community groups that serve survivors, and better LAPD data collection on who is being harmed. It also found that while overall violent crime in the city fell over the previous decade, the number of Black and Hispanic women experiencing violence stayed high.
Tioni’s case is still open. Gov. Gavin Newsom renewed a $50,000 reward in April. “Every family deserves answers and justice,” he said. “These rewards send a message that every case matters, every victim matters, and that we are all working toward increased accountability. If you know something, it is your duty to come forward.”
A reward is what officials offer when they have run out of leads. It does not answer the question the 2023 numbers raised: why one group of women makes up a third of the dead and gets so little of the attention. Black families have long said missing and murdered Black girls draw less coverage and less urgency than others, and Tioni’s own case began that way.
The Guardian reported Monday that Black girls in Los Angeles, tired of watching women around them die and frustrated by what they see as the failures of police and legislators, are organizing and speaking out themselves.
They should not have to. The city has had the data for more than three years. Funding the prevention work its own analysts recommended, and showing the public what the LAPD has done with these cases, would be a start.
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