A transgender inmate serving time at a New Jersey women’s facility has impregnated two female inmates, the NJ Department of Corrections has confirmed.
Transgender inmate impregnated two female inmates
Demetrius Minor, now identifying as Demi, impregnated the women inside Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Clinton, New Jersey’s only all women’s facility.
Minor admitted online that she is responsible for both pregnancies.
Minor also said that all three inmates are now being held in solitary confinement.
The 800-inmate Mahan facility began housing transgender women – including those that have yet to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
The policy change came after a lawsuit brought by an inmate and the ACLU last year. The facility now has 27 trans prisoners.
Women who are pregnant
According to The Daily Mail, one of the pregnant women has been identified as Latonia Bellamy.
Bellamy, 31, is serving life for the murder of Michael Muchioki, 27, and Nia Haqq, 25 who were robbed and killed in Jersey City by Bellamy, her cousin, and a man, after the couple returned from their engagement party and unloaded gifts from their car in April 2010.
Latonia Bellamy
Bellamy has written an essay confessing to the love affair.
In the online essay entitled Freedom, Love, Pregnancy and Trauma, Bellamy said she “found love in a hopeless place”
She also said conditions inside Mahan reeps ‘a pervasive culture of rape.’
However, she added in all capital letters: ‘I WAS NOT RAPED.’
‘Nor was I forced to do anything that I did not want to do,’ she added.
‘Despite it not being permitted I fell in love and had consensual sex with a woman who is trans. Consensual sex is a prohibited act in Edna Mahan.
‘I did what is natural to every human being [I] formed a natural and genuine bond that let to an extensive amount of support, understanding and love.
‘What incarcerated individual do (sic) not yearn for a second chance at life when your teens, twenties and thirties are withering away behind four walls, a steel door and barb wire gates.
‘Your very soul feel (sic) as if you are suffocating inside and the very air you breathe causes internal convulsions.
‘Imagine having someone understand the true capacity of internal feelings that are hard to describe but a simple look or gesture brings forth understanding.’
Demetrius Minor is now a transgender identifying as Demi
Demetrius “Demi” Minor is serving 30 years for killing Theotis Butts, his foster father, at only 16 years old.
Demetrius Minor now Demi (NJ Department of Corrections/Twitter)
In July 2011, he stabbed Butts, 69, several times and then fled to New York where he was arrested.
He was also convicted of carjacking. He approached a couple – whose infant son was in their Pontiac Grand Prix at the time – and pointed a Glock .45 in the woman’s face. The couple got their baby out of the car before Minor sped away with it.
Minor is said to have started her male to female transition in 2020 and was transferred out of the male prison system to Mahan.
Since being incarcerated, the transgender inmate has tried to turn her life around, becoming a “jailhouse lawyer” advocating for other prisoners, and representing her unit on the inmate liaison committee.
In Bellamy’s online essay, she says both she and her lover were abused sexually at very young ages – she was six, he was eight.
She said since falling in love with Minor, her time behind bars has begun to fly by.
‘LOVE was the reason,’ she wrote. ‘Somehow and some way LOVE is utterly forbidden. Yet it was conquered, grasped and explored.
‘Surprisingly a pregnancy came about, an innocent human being is forming and will arrive shortly. Pregnant in prison is a blessing of mockery.’
She claimed correctional officers are now mocking her pregnancy by playing baby songs over the public address system and making references to a ‘million dollar baby,’ which she said is ‘exacerbating my pregnancy anxiety.’
She added that if correctional staff had done their jobs efficiently ‘the conceiving of a baby would have never taken place here at Edna Mahan.’
‘While I do accept accountability for my actions of falling in love, I find myself being in a place of fault which is unfair to me because several blind eyes were turned.
‘Our love was known and not hidden, yet forbidden. A child is going to be born. What is going to be done to assure that a mother can spend an adequate amount of time with her baby before separation?’
The New Jersey Department of Corrections has not released any further comment on the pregnancy revelation.
