I mourn this Kennesaw State University student a year after her tragic death
The end of October marked the one-year anniversary of the death of a Kennesaw State University student.
Hers was a private death and she was deeply mourned by all who knew her, but it’s fitting that her passing should be noted and mourned by all of us, because she was a casualty of one of the current administration’s more insidious and harmful policies.
In January 2025, newly elected President Donald Trump issued executive orders to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the federal government and the private sector.
The administration had to enforce these anti-DEI orders using threats and intimidation. Businesses were threatened with investigations, individuals were threatened with job loss and universities were threatened with funding cuts.
It worked. DEI programs quickly began to disappear as their targets capitulated; then came the resistance. When Georgia colleges and universities began slashing DEI initiatives, students from Kennesaw State University and other schools protested on campus and at the Atlanta Board of Regents headquarters. The pastor of a Georgia megachurch led a nationwide movement to boycott a major retail chain. These and other efforts sent the message that DEI policies should be saved and protected.
What those efforts couldn’t do was save a life.
She felt she was ‘what everyone hates’
In October 2025 Marisol “Mari” Payero, a 22-year old Kennesaw State University student, took her life for reasons we’ll never fully know. What we do know is that Mari was an advocate for DEI support and services for the LGBTQ+ community at KSU.
For Mari and others, the loss of DEI support meant the loss of protection from people and institutions who wanted to erase, deny, attack, or eliminate their identity.
Mari was a transgender woman, an Argentine American and the daughter of immigrants. She favored feminine dresses and flat shoes. She loved hats. Her wavy black hair was long and fell softly around her shoulders. She spoke in a gentle voice with a slight accent. Her smile was big — always so big and beautiful. When she smiled, her eyes crinkled.
Mari was the president of the Kennesaw Pride Alliance, shouldering the burden of leadership within a persistently vulnerable student community. In July 2025, Mari spoke in front of a small crowd in Piedmont Park at the 50th commemorative celebration of the Atlanta Stonewall protests. She started her speech with these words: “I’m a minority being targeted by all the anti-LGBT and anti-immigrant legislation. I’m really what everyone in Congress hates, what every Republican hates.”
Hate is a word that’s all too common in the national discourse these days. Like anything that sees frequent use, its impact has become diluted, its potency watered down. “Haters gonna hate” was a light-hearted catchphrase from a few years back that mockingly dismissed “haters” as inconsequential, but lately hate has become normalized, almost habitual, even acceptable, in today’s divided world.
When a young university student says she is “what everyone hates,” we need to pay attention. We need to understand what it actually feels like to be the target of hate.
Marginalized communities are struggling to survive
Resources for suicide prevention
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, help is available.
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 for free, confidential support, available 24/7.
Georgia Crisis & Access Line: Call 1-800-715-4225 for free, confidential crisis support and access to behavioral health services in Georgia.
Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide: Resources for teens, parents, educators and communities. Visit sptsusa.org or call (732) 410-7900.
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention: Resources for suicide prevention, support for those affected by suicide and information about local programs and events. Visit afsp.org.
For people like Mari, living in a world where the expression of hate is habitual means living under a ceaseless threat of attack. At KSU, the DEI rollbacks ordered by the Trump regime only deepened the feeling of peril within the LGBTQ+ community there.
When the university shut down its DEI programs last year, it effectively swept away constitutional safeguards and severed the only thread of security and protection that Mari and her community had.
“We now stand at the edge of something dangerous,” Mari said in her July speech. “Our institutions are failing us. Our universities have rolled over instead of pushing back, instead of standing for their students, instead of banding together they surrendered to fear. And now they are actively pursuing policies that harm us.”
The personal harm felt by Mari and others at KSU cannot be overstated. The Board of Regents and school administrators stripped away resources for LGBT students and other identity-based groups on campus.
Safe spaces for the queer community were further threatened when KSU announced they were shuttering Stonewall, the campus’s only gender-based housing. Then came the declaration that students’ legal names — not their preferred names — would be required on class rosters and student IDs, forcibly outing transgender and nonbinary students and exposing them to potential harassment, discrimination, or worse.
For many, the DEI rollbacks in 2025 became a distant memory as more and more mind-boggling events crowded the national consciousness. But those in underrepresented communities are still trying to survive under the imposition of misguided policies that deprived them of their basic rights to equal opportunity and protection from discrimination, rights that are promised to all people under the U.S. Constitution and our federal civil rights laws.
“When the inviolable right for self-expression protected by the First Amendment is under threat, no one is safe,” Mari said. “That amendment doesn’t just protect speech. For queer people, for us, it protects the right to use our name, our pronouns, our voices, the right to gather, to organize, to demand better. And to those who defend these decisions, to those who look away or say nothing, to those who know better and still stay silent, when this trouble finds you, and you reach out for help, arms outstretched, don’t be surprised if no one is left to answer your call.”
When she died, Mari was about to start her final semester at KSU. She was studying to be a teacher. One can only imagine how her future students could have benefited from her beautiful smile, her soft intelligent voice. Now we’ll never know.
Caroline Stover is a retired sales and marketing executive who has lived in the Atlanta area for over 15 years. She is active in political causes from reproductive justice to voting rights.
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