Editor's note: A version of this article in Spanish is available here at Al Día.

Daniela Calderon never thought it would happen to her.

She’d seen stories about other transgender women being attacked, sometimes killed, on television. Living alone, thousands of miles from her family in Honduras, she sometimes worried about not having a strong support network in Dallas.

But she had never been attacked, Calderon reminded herself, shaking off the fear. Plus, she did everything she could to be safe when she was working on the street. She always used a condom. She got tested every month. And she stayed fit, just in case.

She felt safe here. She told herself everything would be all right.

Then, on the night of Sept. 20, Calderon was working in Northwest Dallas when a man approached her with $80 in his pocket and a pistol hidden in the cab of his truck.

“Are you afraid?” the man asked. “Are you afraid of dying tonight?”

“He took out the gun,” Calderon said. “And the rest was terrible.”

What happened

Calderon, 35, was born in Honduras and raised in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Her mother died when she was 10 and her father abandoned the family, so she had to find ways to survive on her own. When she lost her job because a manager didn’t want “gays” working in her restaurant, Calderon decided it was time to leave.

She’s been in the United States for the past 10 years, making a living as a sex worker in Florida and, later, Texas. Safety has always been on her mind.

“I was a little afraid, but I never imagined it would happen to me,” Calderon, propped up on a pillow next to her hospital bed, says in Spanish. “I feel an irreversible trauma, something that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, no one, absolutely no one. Why? Because I’ll be marked for the rest of my life.”

In her first interview since the attack, Calderon describes what happened that night two weeks ago, and her frustration that the man who admitted to the crime was released on bail just days after he was arrested. He is back out on the streets, Calderon says, before she has regained strength enough even to walk out the door.

“He did it without remorse,” she adds. “He will do it again.”

1 / 2Daniela Calderon shows scars on her right arm from surgery in her north Texas hospital room on Thursday, October 3, 2019. Calderon, a transgender woman, was shot several times at a bus stop on September 20, 2019. (Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2Daniela Calderon holds up her hospital gown to show scars on her abdomen from surgery in her north Texas hospital room on Thursday, October 3, 2019. Calderon, a transgender woman, was shot several times at a bus stop on September 20, 2019. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

Everything started around 11 p.m. that Friday night. Calderon was working on Dennis Road when a man in a red truck pulled up. She felt suspicious of him from the start. But when he asked for oral sex and agreed to her price, she acquiesced.

Things went bad quickly after that.

“‘Why do you talk like that?’ he said. I said, ‘I am a transgender woman.’ Then he tells me, ‘Oh you’re a man,’” Calderon remembers, gesturing with her red painted nails. “Call me whatever you want,” she told him, “but don’t disrespect me.”

The man said he’d changed his mind then, but for some reason kept pursuing her. Calderon say he lobbed homophobic and transphobic slurs at her: “Then he tells me, ‘Tonight you won’t live anymore. At any moment, they will kill you.’”

Calderon fled to a nearby shop. She stayed for a while, then looked around outside. There was no sign of him.

“He comes from the other side, from the back, so that I could not see him,” Calderon recalls. When she finally spotted him, she says she didn’t have time to react before he pulled out a pistol and aimed it at her.

“All I remember was the ‘boom, boom, boom,’” she says.

The man shot Calderon six times in the abdomen, hip, chest and arm. When the police responded, she was lying in a pool of blood. One of the Dallas officers saved her life by applying tourniquets, she thinks. Calderon was awake the whole time — as the police questioned her, during the ambulance ride and when she arrived at the hospital.

“My whole body ached,” she says. That night, hospital staff helped Calderon record a video for her sister in Honduras, in case she didn’t live through her surgeries. But she survived, and now heaps praise on the doctors and nurses who have kept her alive. “I am still here, fighting, and I thank God for giving me a second chance.”

The Dallas Morning News is not identifying the hospital out of safety concerns.

What happens now

Calderon says she turned to sex work because as an undocumented transgender woman, she couldn’t find a more “dignified” way to make ends meet. She’s been arrested multiple times for prostitution, records show, in Miami, San Antonio and Dallas.

According to recent surveys, some transgender Americans say they engage in sex work when they cannot get or keep jobs due to their gender identity or expression. Under Texas law, it’s legal to fire or refuse to hire people because they’re transgender. Sex work is even more common among trans women of color.

At least 15 transgender people have been killed in Texas since 2015. Police have made arrests in 12 of these cases. Eight of the victims were in sexual relationships with their killers. Calderon knows she was nearly next on the list. Now, she's making the most of her "second chance."

Calderon hopes to get a U visa, she said, which allows victims of certain crimes to stay in the U.S. and eventually apply for a green card if they provide information about what happened to them to law enforcement.

“I feel happy because by having papers I will be able to have a work permit, be able to work with dignity, to contribute to this country which is a country of opportunities,” Calderon says.

She wants to work in a restaurant as a chef’s assistant. She loves Italian food, pizza and pasta. Calderon jokes that is one of the reasons she used to exercise so much, riding her bike long distances or running. Now, her right arm has little feeling. She has difficulty gripping with that hand. Walking is a struggle.

A few times during the interview, Calderon takes breaks to catch her breath or drink water. She dabs at her face with a tissue, her tears making a nearly imperceptible line in her makeup. Her coral lipstick, however, stays fresh.

Once, she asks to go to the bathroom. Getting up out of her chair and making the trip across the room, all of 10 feet, is arduous. Stacey Monroe, a Dallas-based Latinx transgender activist, deftly guides her, softly placing her hands on Calderon’s hips as her slippered feet slide slowly across the floor.

The two women did not know each other before the shooting. But Calderon says Monroe has become like family. Before, she was never connected to the trans community here, Calderon says, but now she knows she’s not alone: “If society doesn’t accept us, we will unite and accept each other.”

Monroe, a local leader for la Organización Latina de Trans in Texas, is fundraising for Calderon's rent and other bills and the group held a rally Tuesday to demand the shooting be treated as a hate crime. Their No. 1 goal right now, both women said, is to put the man who attacked her back behind bars.

Police arrested Domingo Ramirez-Cayente, a 29-year-old Mexican citizen, on Sept. 24. He admitted to police that he shot Calderon and was charged with aggravated assault, a second degree felony. A couple days later, Ramirez-Cayente made bail on a bond set at $25,000.

The news threw Calderon into a depression, knowing he could come back for her or even flee the country.

“Who does justice serve, if by paying a bond a man can leave and this crime can go unpunished? Or, what if he had killed me? It’s unjust. In these moments, I feel courage, lots of frustration,” Calderon said. “He shot me because he hates gay people. I never had contact with him. I never touched him, nothing. Then, why would he shoot me without knowing me? This is a person who is bad in the head and those people should not be on the outside.”

The Dallas District Attorney’s Office said it could not discuss the case because of the ongoing investigation. The DA can suggest a different charge, such as attempted murder, and may be able to add a hate crimes enhancement due to the man’s alleged homophobic comments. The FBI will conduct its own investigation, according to Dallas Police Department.

“That’s why I ask again for justice for me and for all transsexual women, because we have a right to live,” Calderon says. “I demand, with all my heart, that they capture and incarcerate this man. Please, do it. I implore you.”

Staff writer María Méndez contributed to this report.