Halloween used to be Moses Cannon's favorite holiday growing up. It was the one time during the year when no one would make a big deal about him dressing up like a girl. When Moses was 16 years old, he dressed up in girl's clothing, as he did for the last few years, except this time, he wasn't looking back. That year, Moses Cannon became Lateisha Green and transitioned from male to female.

Lateisha wasn't a cross-dresser. She lived her life freely as a female, a decision her mother, Roxanne Greene, admittedly had a hard time accepting because she knew that her child was unprepared to face society's ugly ignorance. What happened on November 14, 2008, was Roxanne's greatest fear. While 22-year-old Lateisha and her 18-year-old brother Mark sat in a car in Syracuse, New York, Dwight DeLee, 20, shot them both. Mark survived but Lateisha died. DeLee has been charged with murder in the second degree as a hate crime and was recently convicted of shooting Lateisha for no other reason than believing she was gay. This is only the second hate crime conviction involving the murder of a transgendered person in United States history.

As the one-year anniversary of Lateisha's death approaches in the fall, her family continues to cope with the enormous loss. Lateisha's mother Roxanne spoke with ESSENCE.com about her difficulty accepting Lateisha's death, giving up her son for a daughter, and why she'll be in the courtroom to see DeLee sentenced for killing her child.

When Lateisha was 16-years-old, she wrote her father and I a letter explaining how she felt about being gay, but I've known since she was about 6 years old. When we would go shopping, she would be in the girls' section looking at clothes. She didn't want us to talk about it. She wanted us to write back if we had anything to say. But I knocked on her bedroom door and said we need to talk. We didn't need a piece of paper between us to talk about this. I told her that I didn't have a problem with it but I tried to explain that the ignorance of some people would be hard to handle. She told me she didn't care because this is who she was and what she wanted.

There was a boy who lived around the corner that Lateisha used to talk to. He got mad because people found out he had something to do with Lateisha. He was still in the closet and embarrassed by it. When I got home, I saw all this blood in the bathroom sink. I found out they had taken Moses to the hospital and he had been slashed all over his face. I told her not to leave the house and she didn't, but this boy and some friends came to the house and did this. The doctor said they had just missed a vital vein and that he was a very lucky young man. All I could think was why?

After that incident Lateisha just stopped running. She got stronger. Suddenly, it didn't matter what people were saying about her. The night she died, Lateisha and her brother Mark drove up to a friend's house. There were people outside talking. The next thing they knew, someone came to the window and opened fire. Lateisha told Mark to take off. She was screaming out, "My heart, my heart." Mark was telling her no, you just got shot in the shoulder. You'll be all right. Mark was on his way to the hospital but all Lateisha wanted to do was come home. I was inside when they came to the house. I ran outside to see my baby on the ground. I got there right before she died. The autopsy report said that her lungs had quickly filled up with blood. The bullet ended up hitting the main artery in the back of her heart. I never thought in a million years that I would be burying my child.