Yet Another Bias Attack in NYC
Yet another anti-gay hate crime has taken place in New York, this time in the West Village, prompting the Anti-Violence Project to issue an alert.
The March 28 AVP message was circulated via email and decried the bias attack, in which two men followed Damian Furtch out of a McDonald's restaurant and onto the street in the early morning hours of March 27. Furtch had noticed the man watching him and sought to avoid trouble by leaving. The men uttered anti-gay pejoratives as they beat Furtch, leaving him battered about the face and in need of stitches, the AVP alert said.
The attack marks the latest in a string of brutal assaults in which the victim was either gay or seemed to have been perceived as gay by the assailants. Another troubling common denominator: the victims had reportedly sought to avoid confrontation, only for their assailants to pursue and pummel them--in one case, to death.
Barie Shortell of Brooklyn needed 10 hours' worth of surgical attention--at a cost of over $100,000, which Shortell cannot pay since he has no insurance coverage--following a brutal bashing last Feb. 22 in Brooklyn's gayborhood of Williamsburg.
According to a March 17 account in local publication the Brooklyn Paper, Shortell was about a block away from his home when he approached a gang of six teens. The youths shouted anti-gay taunts at him, and Shortell went out of his way to avoid trouble, crossing the street. But the youths came after him, threw him against the side of building, and launched into an assault so vicious that one surgeon compared the damage Shortell suffered to the aftermath of a car crash.
"Oh shit, is that a guy or a girl?" one teen called prior to the attack, The Brooklyn Paper reported. Shortell recalled hearing the comment, and thinking that it was "juvenile." He also remembered crossing the street to avoid confrontation, but he could not recall details of the beating itself.
The injuries Shortell suffered told the story. Surgeons put three metal plates on Shortell's skull, the article said, and tended to his broken jaw. Shortell's eye sockets were shattered and his nose broken.
"I feel pretty confident they perceived me as a gay man and attacked me, but I can't understand why they did what they did," Shortell said. "I looked horrible. Blood was everywhere."
The AVP alert recalled the assault against Shortell and also recounted, "On February 26, Staten Island resident Ronald Jones beat and choked his friend, Robert Jenkins, to death. Jones has told police that he was driven into a murderous rage by Jenkins' unwanted sexual advances."
In another incident of bias-driven assault, a gang of youths crashed a party being hosted by a gay man in Queens on March 12 and targeted a straight teenager for violence--with deadly results.
Four young men invaded a party attended by 18-year-old Anthony Collao. Though the party was hosted by two gay men, Collao himself was heterosexual. The invaders reportedly broke windows, scrawled on the walls with red markers, and made hand gestures associated with gangs. The men also reportedly attacked and beat Collao while hurling anti-gay epithets, media accounts said.
Collao reportedly tried to avoid violence by leaving the party, but the gang chased him down, threw him up against a car, and pummeled him mercilessly. Collao was reportedly punched, kicked, and stomped, and beaten with a pipe.
Four suspects were later placed under arrest. One of the young men was wearing Collao's baseball cap, and the other three were drenched with blood. One suspect, Alex Velez, is 16, and lives in the Bronx; the other three, identified as Christopher Lozada, Nolis Ogando, and Luis Tabales, are from Queens and are 17 years old.
Collao was on life support until March 14, when he died in the hospital. The young man's parents operate an ice cream establishment in Queens, though the family lives on Long Island. A neighbor said that Collao was "a very respectful, very friendly, very handsome young man."
The attacks on Collao, Shortell, and now Furch are far from isolated instances of anti-gay violence. Several apparently bias-driven attacks have taken place in Queens recently. Last December, two young men pled guilty to an attack on a gay man whom he and another suspect robbed and beat in 2009 outside of a deli.
Daniel Aleman, 27, and Daniel Rodriguez, 22, carried out the assault on 50-year-old Jack Price early in the morning on Oct. 8, 2009. The attackers shouted anti-gay epithets as they punched and kicked Price, delivering a beating so severe that the older man spent weeks in the hospital with serious injuries, including a broken jaw, a punctured lung, and a lacerated spleen. The two attackers also stole Price's wallet. Aleman addressed the court at his Dec. 13, 2009 sentencing, saying that he was drunk at the time of the attack and robbery.
"I'm very sorry for what I did," said Aleman, who had pleaded guilty to charges of robbery as a hate crime, and received the sentence of eight years plus five years of supervision after his prison term on Dec. 13. "I was drunk and I was under the influence," Aleman added. "I made a very big mistake."
Rodriguez similarly pleaded guilty
Perhaps the most infamous hate crime remains the murder of heterosexual Ecuadorean immigrant Jos� Sucuzha�ay, who was walking home from a church party on a bitter cold night with his brother. The two were huddled together for warmth as they walked; they were mistaken for a gay couple and attacked by two men, one of whom beat Sucuzha�ay to death with a baseball bat.
"Recent attacks in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and now the West Village shows us that violence affects all of us," Sharon Stapel, Executive Director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, said in the alert.
"This is a wake-up call for every New Yorker: We must work to end this culture of violence--and not just violence against LGBTQ people--but all violence," Stapel continued. "We can end violence through the conversations we have, the relationships we build, and the connections we make. Together we can make our city safer for all people."
Openly gay Speaker of the City Council Christine Quinn condemned the attack and noted that it had taken place "in a neighborhood where the LGBT civil rights movement was really born," reported CBS New York on March 30.
"Some people still think that hate crimes are kind of a joke in New York City, that it's just some type of adult bullying that doesn't have any consequences and we want people to know that that is simply not true," Quinn said in remarks made to 1010 WINS, CBS New York reported.
"We are not going to allow you to attack people because of who they are or who they think you are," Quinn added.
But there is another way in which the attack follows a discernible pattern: Furtch went public using social media, posting a photo of his injuries on Facebook. Several other victims of apparent bias-driven crimes have similarly taken their stories to social media outlets, with the story of three gay Americans attacked on St. Lucia gaining entree to mainstream media through a Facebook account and a young gay man in Detroit narrating the story of how he was savagely attacked in a convenience story as onlookers watched and laughed in a video he posted at YouTube.