Last year, 23 reported transgender women were murdered. And, though the majority of those crimes have gone unsolved, we’re one step closer to justice for the youngest victim, Mercedes Williamson, who was bludgeoned to death with a hammer at only 17.

In early June 2015, Mercedes’s alleged assailant, 28-year-old Josh Vallum, who was her boyfriend, told his father that he had killed someone and buried that person in the field behind his dad’s Alabama home. The next day, authorities dug up a partially decomposed body and arrested Josh. Due to an affidavit filed in the court this past week, The Sun Herald discovered the reported member of the Latin Kings street gang has confessed to police that he committed the crime.

Josh’s trial is set for July 18 and the district attorney’s office is seeking a DNA sample to compare to the blood stains found in his car. Josh, who has been in police custody since early June, also requested a reduction in his $1 million bond, stating, “I have a job waiting on me upon my release and request a bond of a reasonable amount so that I be allowed to better prepare myself for trial, sentencing, and incarceration,” but he’s not likely to get it. “Admitting [to] a murder (absent some claim of self-defense) automatically makes the defendant potentially dangerous to the community,” Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director at the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School told Broadly.

And his confession will also hopefully help the prosecution’s case against Josh who, despite the confession, pleaded not guilty, according to the Sun Herald. “Short of a video of a defendant actually committing a crime, there is nothing more powerful than hearing that the defendant, in his own words, admitted a crime,” Rodgers said. “The defense will have to undermine the confession somehow at trial, and will likely spend a great deal of its time working on this aspect of the case.”

But there remains one big question: Will the case be investigated as a hate crime? Though, according to the Advocate, Josh knew that Mercedes, an aspiring cosmetologist, was a transgender woman before he killed her, the motive for the crime is still unkown. According to Rodgers, who said she isn’t familiar enough with this specific case to know whether or not it qualifies, “The federal hate crimes law explicitly includes gender identity as one of its categories, so [there] could be a way to charge the crime federally if the state murder prosecution is unsuccessful for some reason.”

If Mercedes’s murder is charged as a hate crime, it will be a unique case, as most of the transgender murders last year were not classified in that way, despite the fact that there seems to be a clear epidemic. Gender theorist Judith Butler told Broadly last year that men often kill transgender women as a result of feeling threatened. "Trans women have relinquished masculinity […] and that is very threatening to a man who wants to see his power as an intrinsic feature of who he is,” she said.

Though the specific details surrounding Josh and Mercedes’s relationship are not well known, the classification of her brutal murder as a hate crime and if Josh felt he could get away with his actions because of her gender identity, are crucial for the transgender community. “Every time one trans person is killed, the message goes out to every trans person: You are not safe; this dead body could be yours,” Butler said. “So when the crime is not named as a hate crime, or when the crime is dismissed because the murderer was somehow ‘prompted,’ the police are sending the same message as the murderer.”

Officials now have the opportunity with Josh’s confession to get to the bottom of why Mercedes was murdered and offer real justice not only for her death, but also for all the other transgender women who are victims of violent crimes. Let’s hope they investigate this incident properly.

Related: Why Planned Parenthood Is Offering Trans-Friendly Healthcare