“I came here for safety and acceptance," Samantha Hulsey, a 25-year-old trans woman who moved to San Francisco from Savannah, Georgia in 2013, told the Chronicle after she was brutally assaulted for the second time this year. In the most recent incident, Hulsey was coming from dinner and a movie with her fiancee, Daira Hopwood on Sunday when, near 8th and Mission Streets a couple — suspects later identified as Dewaytne Kemp, 36, and Rebecca Westover, 42 — attacked her.

"It’s not OK for people to do this anywhere," said Hulsey, who suffered a swollen jaw and a bruise under her eye, "but here [San Franciscans] have a reputation for being accepting.”

Just this past January, Hulsey was on a date with her then-partner, a 52-year-old trans woman, when a man harassed the couple on the 49 bus, following them when they get off. With a three-and-a-half inch long steak knife, he stabbed Hulsey below her neck. She ran bleeding into a McDonald's for help and was transported to the hospital. Gawker, which ran with the recent story, writes that the attacker in that case, 54-year-old Brodus Wane Joynes, faces a possible life sentence.

Hulsey's long brown hair now cover the scars from that incident (she's considering getting them covered with tattoos, in time) but her life was again threatened and her face bruised this week.

Officers on a routine patrol in SoMa found Hulsey and her current partner, Hopwood, when bystanders flagged them down. One had reportedly tried to intervene, defending Hulsey.

"[The couple was] telling us we needed to get the hell up out of here," Hulsey said, indicating the couple hurled homophobic and transphobic slurs.

San Francisco Police Department Officer Grace Gatpandan tells tells ABC7 that on Sunday, "hot coffee was thrown in [Hulsey's] face as well as punches to her face and verbal threats against her." Gatpandan says that the one suspect, Westover, was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, conspiracy, battery and a weapons violation, and that the other, Kemp, was arrested on suspicion of felony counts of aggravated assault, making threats, and conspiracy. Kemp is also suspected of being in violation of his parole in possession of drug paraphernalia. Both were booked at San Francisco County Jail with hate-crime enhancements.

"I was very frightened," Hulsey recalled of the incident, later adding that "There seems to be a common misperception that just because there's some trans people on television portrayed in a positive light that everything is all fine and dandy now."

Hopwood, a computer scientist researching programming languages, said she was "frozen with fear... it was almost as if they were going to beat up the next trans person they saw."

Her instinct might be right. Senior policy director for the San Francisco Human Rights Commission Sneh Rao notes that 79 percent of transgender people surveyed last year by the agency reported being the victims of violence in San Francisco

“It’s really disturbing that this has happened twice within a year and both times when I was with a partner,” Hulsey said. “I came here to be safe, but we’re really not safe anywhere.”

Previously: Transgender Woman Harassed On Bus, Stabbed Near Civic Center