Tamara Dominguez’s murder in Kansas City – the 17th of a trans person in the US this year – led to an outcry. Why didn’t anybody know about No 18, in the same summer, in the same city?

It is Mexican tradition to amass red and white flowers at a funeral for a woman.

But there were no flowers on Saturday for Tamara Dominguez, the record 17th transgender person reported killed in the United States this year, because her brother planned the service. And her brother still refers to Dominguez as a man named Jesus – even after she was run over three times by a sport-utility vehicle in a church parking lot.

When they found out, friends and advocates rushed to a nearby florist and returned to Mt Washington Mausoleum Chapel with bouquet upon bouquet for the closed casket. Dominguez’s partner, whom the Guardian will call Cristian as he fears for his safety in this city that has become the epicenter of America’s transgender violence, still does not know if his girlfriend of six years is wearing men’s clothing inside.

“I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was there,” Cristian said through a translator on Sunday. “A lot of people still cried for her.”

The killing of Dominguez, after being initially reported in local media as a homicide investigation into the death of a man, has drawn national attention: the actor Laverne Cox used it to call trans murders “a state of emergency”, and Caitlyn Jenner has said “no one should be killed simply because they are transgender”.

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But the Guardian has learned that Dominguez’s case is the second killing of a transgender woman of color in as many months in Kansas City: Jasmine Collins is at least the 18th transgender person, unreported until now, to have been murdered in the US this year.

There are still few answers as the trans community begins to grapple with yet another near-forgotten tragedy, because friends and potential witnesses did not know if Collins was dead or alive and advocates say police considered her to be “some guy”.

The Kansas City police department, whose LGBT liaison said it was “willing to push the envelope and create change” after a gay black man was shot in the face and killed here last year during what family and the community believed to be a hate-motivated incident, was apparently looking for a male victim named Jermaine Collins in June – even after she was stabbed to death in a parking lot, said witnesses who eventually came forward, over a haircut and a pair of shoes.

The story of two trans homicides in one Missouri city represent what LGBT activists, law-enforcement watchdogs and friends of the victims see as a parallel non-starter to reforms stemming from protests over police violence: without a federal system to report backyard homicides that may be federal hate crimes, and reliant on the local news to accurately identify people when police are not, witnesses find nowhere to turn while a country struggles to tell where lives end and a state of emergency begins.

“One of the most important ways we can expect law enforcement and federal agencies to stop transgender murder is to adequately track them,” said Randall Jenson, youth and outreach coordinator for the Kansas City Anti-Violence Project, which works to support LGBT people affected by violence. “But we can’t even track transgender violence or respond appropriately when police and media outlets refuse to name a trans person’s identity.”

‘It was Jasmine’

In an area north of downtown known to everyone in Kansas City as the Bottoms, near the old airport still used for private jets and private offices, is a low-income building called the Holiday Apartments. It was once a hotel but is now known to anyone in street-based sex work as the home of drug addicts and prostitutes, often both.

It was also home to 33-year-old Jasmine Collins.

“She was just the typical girl out here,” said Kris Wade, co-founder and executive director of the Justice Project, which works with 29 women engaged in so-called “survival sex work”, a majority of whom are transgender or sex-trafficked into Kansas City.

Collins knew most of the women on the streets – she sometimes joined them for a weekly Justice Project meeting at a church at St James Parish, insisting that she wanted to get out of the business – even if she didn’t get along with many of her colleagues.

The small arguments didn’t stop Collins’s fellow street-workers from looking out for her, especially when the rumors started flying on 23 June.

Wade was out of town taking care of her sick father, but the text messages were ceaseless: did Jasmine get killed outside the Fast Stop? I heard Jasmine got killed behind the Fast Stop.

Knowing that the Fast Stop gas station on Independence Avenue was notorious as a place where any cop could “always find a body”, Wade said she called the Kansas City police homicide division for answers.

“Did you guys find a transgender woman dead body behind the Fast Stop?” she recalls asking the detectives. “And they’re like, ‘No, we haven’t had any bodies behind the Fast Stop’.”

So the text messages were returned with reassurances: she’s probably just out of town for a bit. The local TV station reported that a woman killed a man after a trip by Collins – Jermaine J Collins, according to court documents filed by the police – “for a haircut when the two began arguing over a pair of Vans shoes”.

For 10 days, the people looking out for Jasmine Collins on the streets – potential witnesses, potential victims – did not know she was dead. But when Wade returned to Kansas City and heard that Tia Townsel – a cisgender woman counseled at those same church meetings to get sex workers off the streets – had been arrested and charged with second-degree murder, she says she called the homicide detectives again.

“Hey, you guys got Tia Townsel in custody?” Wade recalls asking the police. “And they say, ‘Oh, yeah! She killed some guy down at the Bottoms.’”

“So I asked if that person was transgender and they said they didn’t know,” Wade said. “I said, ‘Find out.’ And sure enough – it was Jasmine.”

A spokeswoman for the Kansas City police confirmed Townsel’s arrest and the murder charge. She said Collins was not identified by name or gender in an initial homicide incident report, which the department, citing an ongoing investigation, refused to release.

‘Shine a light’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Friends and family of Tamara Dominguez gathered on Friday at the church parking lot where she was run over three times. A homicide investigation is ongoing, after she was initially identified as male. Photograph: Randall Jensen

Two Mondays ago, the Kansas City Star newspaper reported the death of a man, identified by police as Jesus E Dominguez, who was “also known as Tamara”. Officially, it was the first public word of the 17th trans person killed in the US so far this year, up from 12 in all of last year, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Project – though LGBT advocates consider both numbers far from accurate.

The newspaper changed its pronouns and defended itself, but activists in the transgender community were livid: this city may have seen at least nine LGBT homicides since 2010, but they remain frustrated that local media has become the de facto first-warning system for potential hate crimes. Violence against trans people is on the rise, say advocates in Missouri and beyond, but the cycle of gender misidentification – from police reports, to the crime blotter, into a victim-filled void – may be doomed to repeat itself.

There is currently no comprehensive federal system for tracking transgender homicides.

In December, the FBI included gender identity for the first time as a form of bias in its annual hate-crime statistics – and found only 33 such cases. The National Coalitions of Anti-Violence Programs found 1,359 anti-LGBT incidents in its 2014 report on hate violence, which cites press, police and community reports. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, a government agency which has struggled to keep better track of police killings than the FBI, says the number of hate crimes overall may be 40 times more than the FBI’s count.

“More accurate, respectful and consistent reporting by both media and government about trans people’s lives and deaths is sorely needed,” said Harper Jean Tobin, director of policy at the National Center for Transgender Equality, “to give us a picture of the problem we are facing and its solutions.”

Last week, Tobin’s group embarked on the largest survey of transgender and gender non-conforming people in the US to “shine a light” on their experiences. It cannot measure when they find out about homicides in their communities, she said, because police still do not appropriately report them.

For women like Tamara Dominguez, reporting begins with acceptance at home. After her transition was rejected by her family, she escaped Mexico for Kansas City to find a new one.

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But escape couldn’t save her – or other LGBT people in Kansas City, like Dionte Greene, a gay 22-year-old black man who was shot and killed in his car last Halloween, and Dee Dee Pearson, a 31-year-old transgender woman of color murdered in 2011 and misgendered in local news reports.

“I know that she was the kind of person that was always looking forward,” Cristian said over coffee, after attending a vigil in the church parking lot where his partner was run over on 16 August but now stands a sign reading LGBT Lives Matter. “One of the things she would say is that you can’t be consumed in the hurt – you must keep moving forward.”

With that spirit, Cristian and another friend set up a GoFundMe page shortly after Dominguez’s death was first misreported, to help raise money for rent and a proper burial back home in Mexico. As word spread and big names like Cox brought attention to the grisly death, 150 individual gifts passed their target of $4,000.

By the end of the funeral on Saturday, “In Loving Memory of Tamara Dguez” was inactive. A GoFundMe representative said that a user with the account’s password had taken down Dominguez’s fundraising page – but neither her lover nor her best friend knew who or how.

When they found out another answer in the transgender homicide cycle had been lost to a black hole, they pressed on: on Sunday, they plan to hold their own memorial service to celebrate the life of Tamara Dominguez – a community healing event for a that has lost three young LGBT people in one year.

They do not expect her brother to attend.