Jason Mattison Jr. (from Baltimore Sun)

As LGBT advocates here in Dallas and around the country are planning candlelight vigils in memory of Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado — the 19-year-old boy who was raped, stabbed, burned and dismembered last week in Puerto Rico — word comes out of Baltimore about another murdered gay teen.

Jason Mattison Jr. was 15, an openly gay sophomore at the Vivian T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy in Baltimore. He was found dead last week at his aunt’s house. He had been raped, gagged with a pillowcase and stabbed repeatedly in the head and throat. Then his body was shoved into an upstairs closet at the house.

Police have arrested 35-year-old Dante Parrish and charged him with first degree murder. A cousin of Mattison’s has described the suspect, already convicted once of murdering someone else, as a longtime friend of the family, but she would not say whether Parrish lived at the house where Mattison died or if he was just visiting.

Read the full story here.

— Tammye Nash

Tags: Baltimore, gay, Mattison, murder, teen

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Activism, Blogging, Discrimination, Hate Crime, Media, NEWS, People, crime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.