Man says perpetrators called him ‘faggot’ as they were beating him with fists, bricks outside apartment complex on Lucas Drive

An Oak Lawn man was injured in an attack over the Memorial Day Weekend, and he said this week he believes the assault was an anti-gay hate crime.

Richard Allen said, in a telephone interview Wednesday, May 28, that he was walking home from a Maple Avenue nightclub early on Sunday morning, May 25, when he was attacked by five men outside an apartment complex in the 2900 block of Lucas Drive.

Allen said one of the men accosted him as he walked down an alley between two apartment buildings, “talking to me, asking me where I was going and if I knew the password.”

“He kept talking to me, trying to distract me until the others got there,” Allen said, adding that other men jumped out of a truck parked nearby and from an apartment in the complex to join in the attack.

He said the men kicked him and hit him with their fists and with bricks, leaving him with two fractures in his arm, abrasions on his head and bruises all over his body.

“They just jumped me and started beating on me and calling me ‘faggot’ and stuff like that,” Allen said. “But I put up a real fight. I fought back hard.”

Allen said that friends who live nearby saw the attack and called police. The police report of the incident notes that Dallas Fire-Rescue was called to the scene, but paramedics left because Allen was intoxicated and “not cooperative.”

Allen acknowledged that he had been drinking, and said he was very angry and upset, and that he wanted to find the men who had attacked him.

Paramedics later returned to the scene and transported Allen to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Allen said Wednesday he tried to take photos of his attackers with his camera phone, but the phone was damaged in the attack and he had not been able to retrieve the photos.