It was hard for Kyra Cordova to find shoes.
She was 6-foot with size 14 feet and finding clothes wasn’t that easy for her.
She and her mother were thrift shopping one day, and Kyra came across a pair of red Louis Vuitton jeans she had to have. One look proved they would not fit her. But her mother, Dawn Maher, made her a deal: Fit into them and she’d buy them for her.
“In the dressing room, you hear banging, her elbows hitting the wall,” Dawn said. “Twenty minutes later…she can’t button them.”
“I told her ‘Put them back, they are not your pants.’” she said, laughing. “We didn’t buy the pants.”
It was Kyra’s conviction, sense of humor and confidence that her mother misses most about her daughter. On Memorial Day weekend in 2012, Kyra’s body was found near a Wawa on a side street in Juniata. The 27-year-old was approached from behind, and shot in the head for no apparent reason.
Her killer, presumably, still walks the streets.
Kyra was a normal kid — funny, smart, always with friends or doing something crafty or artistic. As youngster, she was known as Kristopher Herold. At 16, Kyra wrote Dawn a letter saying she was gay and two years later, she came out to her mother as a transgender woman.
Kyra moved from Hatfield, Montgomery County, to Philadelphia and the city became her home.
“In Philadelphia,” Dawn said, “I think she found a place that was more comfortable and accepting—where she could be a little more open.”
She volunteered for the Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative, performed in drag—her stage name was Kyra Cruz—for benefits and Toys for Tots. She was even asked to represent the local transgender community at a conference in Colorado.
Her art was shown at William Way, a Philadelphia community center that advocates for sexual and gender minorities in the region.
She was helpful and made her own clothes. As a kid, she was always performing, Dawn said. And she had a lot of friends.
It was those friends Dawn assumed she was with on Memorial Day weekend in 2012. Kyra had called her mother that week before asking if she could move back home. Dawn didn’t know exactly why but told her to come and the two would sit and talk. She didn’t see or hear from her that weekend.
“I figured she’s probably out with her friends. It didn’t really occur to me that anything was wrong,” Dawn said. “Until the police showed up at my house.”
There were times Kyra struggled with drugs and alcohol, her mother said, and it was hard for her to keep a job for a long period of time. She had gone back to school to get her medical assistant’s degree and had a job at a doctor’s office but was let go.
“She was told she made the patients uncomfortable,” Dawn said. “She dealt with that a lot.”
Just prior to her death, Kyra was working at a Home Depot. Dawn found out after her death that Kyra had been let go just days before.
“When she called me to come home, there was something more there,” Dawn said.
But she never got to find out.
Dawn still keeps in touch with some of Kyra’s closest friends. A friend of hers who had just gotten married recently and moved to California posted on Facebook a street sign he came across that read “Princess Kyra.”
“Is that weird or what?” Dawn said. The photo was hashtagged “#thebitchisalwayswatching.”
Her mother hasn’t given up hope that Kyra’s killer will be found. She tries to keep her only child’s memory alive by continuing to fight for trans rights and volunteering.
“I truly believe in karma. So essentially, you can’t do mean and terrible things without suffering some kind of consequence at some point in your life,” she said.
“They shot her in her weave. You can’t shoot a girl in her weave and get away with it! You can’t mess up her hair!”
Dawn has kept her sense of humor.
It really shone several years ago when she accompanied Kyra and Kyra’s boyfriend at the time on another shopping trip. This time, there were shoes that Kyra had to have.
“They are not gonna fit your huge feet!” Dawn remembers telling her.
Kyra took that as a challenge. She tried to squish her feet into heels a few sizes too small. It wasn’t easy to find a women’s size 14 in a regular department store. Kyra managed to get a foot in. She handled a few steps.
“You could see in her how bad they hurt,” Dawn said.
But then, the shoes wouldn’t come off. They were stuck because she had jammed her feet into them, Dawn remembered.
“I am hysterically laughing because I couldn’t get the shoe off!” she said. “She’s basically on the floor, she comes right off the bench and I’m hysterical. Thank God her friend was there!”
He was finally able to pry them off her feet.
After that, Dawn said, “she wore a lot of flats.”
Kyra is survived by her mother, friends, her father and many half-siblings.
