Yaeli Martinez Coached by Trans Student, Commits Suicide in 2019

El Salvadoran immigrant, Abigail Martinez, grieves the loss of her child Andrew, born Yaeli, who tragically committed suicide in September 2019, at the age of 19.

From the Daily Mail: Martinez, a mother of four, claimed school staff told Yaeli not to speak to her mother about transgender issues, but secretly had her join an LGBTQ group that persuaded the girl that the only way to be happy was to transition.

The El Salvador-born mother said an older trans student ‘coached’ Yaeli on what to tell social workers to put her into foster care, so that the state would pay for her gender reassignment.

Yaeli was encouraged by her LA County school to take hormones and transition, rather than to treat her depression by conventional and clinically proven means.

According to the mother, Yaeli was always the “girly girl” of the house up until her sophomore year of high school, when things began to change. Initially, Yaeli began by questioning her own sexuality–which Abigail dismissed as normal for her age. However, upon joining the school’s LGBTQ group, Yaeli began questioning her own gender as well.

This questioning was likely brought about by the same older transgender student who coached Yaeli on how to get taken into foster care for transitioning purposes, all while the school encouraged her to take hormones. The trans student in question told Yaeli in 2016–at age 16–to run away from home and to lie about being abused by her own mother so that social services would not allow her to return home.

Although Martinez kept custody of her three other children and continued to work as a nanny, an LA family court judge ruled Yaeli – who now went by Andrew – would be placed in foster care with brief, monitored visitation rights by his mother.

‘On the visit days, when she came to my house, I was told not to talk about God,’ Martinez said. ‘They told me if you do that, you’ll never see your daughter.

Despite the mother’s love and support for her child, social services did not allow her extensive visitation rights. Despite the effort to transition genders while in a new environment, Yaeli’s depression only worsened, culminating in an attempted overdose in 2019, months before stepping in front of the train which tragically took her life.

In 2020 Martizen filed a civil suit against LA County and LA County’s Department of Child and Family Services, claiming that the government is responsible for her daughter’s suicide. Given the facts of the case, it is a reasonable claim. With any luck, justice will be had and no one else will have to go through having their daughter groomed and taken away from them.