Vicious Beating of Gay Texan Contrasts to Reality Star’s ’Bashing’
It was announced last week that three suspects will be charged with hate crimes for the attack of a 26-year-old gay Reno, Texas, man, the Paris (Texas) News reported. The Lamar County grand jury informed Burke Brunette that the suspects for his attack will face three counts each of aggravated assault with hate crimes enhancements. Additionally, two of the suspects will be charged with enhancements as repeat offenders.
"I'm super-happy about today's news," Burnett told the Dallas Voice. "That makes me feel really good. It was a quick indictment. I'm just pleased with how Gary Young, the DA, is handling it."
Criminals who are charged with second-degree felonies can face up to 20 years in prison, but the suspects in this case could receive a life in prison sentence as the hate crimes enhancements would turn the charges into first-degree felonies.
Burnett claims that his attackers yelled homophobic epithets, punched him in the eye, stabbed him in the back with a broken beer bottle, and threw him onto a fire, according to the Dallas Voice. As a result, the young man suffered second-degree burns and needed more than 30 stitches.
A few days after the incident, the three suspects, 31-year-old James Mitchell Lasater III, 25-year-old Micky Joe Smith and 33-year-old Daniel Shawn Martin, were arrested. The men are charged with aggravated assault causing bodily injury and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, the news source reported.
"I certainly think this was a bias-motivated crime," Chuck Smith, deputy director of Equality Texas told the Dallas Voice. "This is what our hate crimes act is for. It's good from the standpoint that it could result in enhanced penalties. It's equally if not more important that it sends a message that Lamar County is not going to tolerate bias crimes."
Thankfully, Brunette had his stitches taken out last week and there are no signs of long-lasting damage. He said that his burns and black eye are healing up as well.
Reno is a tiny (2,767) town just beyond Paris, Texas, about 100 miles northeast of Dallas and near the Oklahoma border. At the beginning of this year, nine local elected officials defected en masse from the Democratic to Republican party, in a dramatic display of the area's far-rightward drift.
Unfortunately, hate crimes are far too common in the LGBT community and even happen to people in the media. The Daily Caller reports in a November 12, article that a cast member for the gay reality TV show "A-List Dallas" was a victim of a hate crime last week. Taylor Garrett was punched in the eye and bloodied on Friday night because he is a gay Republican and is associated with the always controversial, Ann Coulter.
Garrett claims that he was attacked outside a birthday party in Dallas after noticing the words "Fuck Coulter" written on the side of his car.
"I was at a party and one of my friends arrived and I had a present for him, so I went back to my car to get the present," he said. "When I walked out to my car, I saw someone squatting next to my car."
Garrett confronted the man but the criminal punched him in the eye, causing Garrett to fall, scrapping his body on some glass. Unlike Brunette's case, Garrett's attacker managed to escape.
The reality star says that he as been attacked in the past as well. Last month, Garrett claimed that someone threw a rock through his living room window. Attached to the rock was a 'threatening, anti-conservative' note.