Man accused of beating trans woman to death as she slept near Miami City Ballet is arrested

MIAMI — A man caught on video surveillance beating a transgender woman to death — smacking her on her head and face with a pipe as she slept Tuesday near the Miami City Ballet building in Miami Beach — has been arrested, police said.

Gregory Fitzgerald Gibert, 53, who was out on probation, is charged with the second-degree murder of 37-year-old Andrea Doria Dos Passos, whom police said was homeless. Gibert was booked into a Miami-Dade County jail where he remained as of Wednesday afternoon.

Around 7 a.m. Tuesday, an employee of Miami City Ballet, 2200 Liberty Ave., spotted Dos Passos on the floor and tried to wake her up, according to Gibert’s arrest report. When the employee saw blood around her, he called 911.

Paramedics found her body partially covered by a sweater, with lacerations on her face and back of her head and two wooden sticks lodged into her nostrils.

“One stick exited over the right eye and the other appeared lodged into the nose cavity,” police said on Gibert’s arrest report. “A puncture wound was also located in the victim’s chest.”

Surveillance footage from Miami City Ballet shows the woman lying down by the building’s entrance around midnight, police said in the report.

Hours later, a man is seen looking around and at Dos Passos, walking away and picking up a pipe from the ground before sitting on a bench near the woman, police said. That’s when the man — later identified as Gibert — walked toward the woman and “begins to strike her with the metal pipe about the head and face several times.”

After beating her, Gibert is seen walking away and placing the pipe in a nearby trashcan, where cops found it later, police said.

After matching Gibert’s physical description to one of his previous mugshots, police found him at 1524 NW First Ave. hours later before taking him to the police station, where he declined to speak with officers. Police say Gibert was wearing some of the same bloodstained clothes he had on during the attack.

Gibert is behind bars at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, jail records show.

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