Tag Archives: murder

Murder not being handled as hate crime by San Antonio police

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On Feb. 21, Cody Carmichael, 21, shot and killed Troy Clattenburg, 24.

The murder took place in Clattenburg’s mother’s apartment in San Antonio. Carmichael was arrested and confessed to the murder. He said he shot Clattenburg because of unwanted sexual advances.

San Antonio police are refusing to investigate the murder as a hate crime and Carmichael is preparing a “gay panic” defense, according to the San Antonio Express News.

Carmichael and another man were at Clattenburg’s house earlier in the evening. The two left. The other man gave Carmichael the gun. He returned and shot Clattenburg. No charges have been filed against the other man who supplied the gun.

—  David Taffet

Another murder in Puerto Rico

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Puerto Rican officials are investigating the murder of an unidentified man found stabbed to death in a motel in Ponce, according to a post today on the Boy in Bushwick blog.

Just about a month after gay teen Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado was murdered, dismembered and set on fire in Caguas, Puerto Rico, the unidentified man’s nude body was found inside a room at Motel Las Colinas in Ponce on wednesday, Dec. 16. Police said the man’s throat had been slashed, and he had been stabbed about 20 times in other parts of his body, injuries apparently incurred as he tried to defend himself.

Boy in Bushwick reports that the man, believed to be gay and between 40 and 45 years old, had checked into the motel the day before with a second man. The second man, also unidentified, left the hotel about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Puerto Rican gay activist Pedro Julio Serrano has called on police to treat the murder as an anti-gay hate crime. In a statement released to the Spanish-speaking media on Thursday, Serrano said: “Through the particular circumstances of his arrival at the motel with another man, the brutality of his murder, the hate with which [the second man allegedly] committed it and through clear signs of cruelty, we ask the authorities to investigate the hate angle in this case.”

—  admin

Lopez murder to be tried as hate crime

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Murder victim Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, right, and Juan Martinez Matos, left, the man accused of killing him
Murder victim Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, left, and Juan Martinez Matos, right, the man accused of killing him

The U.S. Attorney for Puerto Rico, Rosa Emilia Rodriguez, has said that her office will be filing hate crime charges against Juan A. Martinez Matos in connection with the murder last month of gay teen Jorge Steve Lopez Mercado, if local authorities do not charge him with a hate crime, according to reports today on Edge.com.

Martinez Matos has reportedly confessed to stabbing Lopez Mercado, dismembering his body and then setting him on fire. If he is tried on federal hate crimes charges, he will be the first person to face such charges since President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act into law in October, according to Edge.com. That act added sexual orientation and gender identity to the federal hate crimes law.

The gay news site also reports that a judge in Caguas, Puerto Rico has ordered that Martinez Matos undergo a psychiatric evaluation to make sure he is competent to stand trial.

—  admin

A message from the mother of Jorge Steven "Steven Miller" Lopez Mercado

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Teen injured in anti-gay attack in Liverpool

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As the mourning continues for Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado of Puerto Rico and Jason Mattison Jr. of Baltimore — and as we wait to see what happens following an attack on Houston 16-year-old Jayron Martin — PinkNews in the United Kingdom has published a report about a 19-year-old gay man who was beaten by eight young men in Liverpool because they didn’t like his flamboyant style of dress.

The young man, who was not identified by name, suffered a broken nose and will have surgery next week to repair the injuries inflicted in the attack. He told Pink News:  “I was bombarded with punches, I didn’t know where they were coming from. They were shouting, ‘what the f**k are you wearing?!’ I can’t even get on the train without suffering abuse. It’s everywhere I go. I wear colourful stuff, and lipstick, but if I didn’t it would be restricting how I want to be.”

He also said he had been attacked before, and that his ex-boyfriend needed extensive surgery after being assaulted 18 months ago.

Gay trainee policeman James Parkes was hospitalized with a fractured skull after being set upon and beaten by a gang of young men in Liverpool in October, and in August 2008, gay 18-year-old Michael Causner died after being beaten by two other teens, also in Liverpool.

—  admin

Candlelight vigil Sunday

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Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, left, and Jason Mattison Jr.
Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, left, and Jason Mattison Jr.

Local activists are organizing a candlelight vigil to begin at 6:15 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 22, at the intersection of Cedar Springs Road and Throckmorton Street. The vigil is being held in memory of Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, a gay teen murdered last week in Puerto Rico, and Jason Mattison Jr., a gay teen murdered last week in Baltimore. The Dallas Chapter of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network is participating.

Everyone is asked to bring a candle and gather to not only honor the murdered children, but to speak out against the violence that claimed their lives.

Bob McCranie, one of the organizers, expressed outrage that the murders have not gained more national media attention.

“This should at least be in the top five news stories, and none of the mainstream media are paying any attention,” McCranie said of Mercado’s murder, before learning of Mattison’s death. “A teenager has been burnt and butchered in the streets, and all we can talk about is how many lies are in Sarah Palin’s book, and why Obama bowed to the Japanese prime minister. It is outrageous and unacceptable.”

—  admin

Another gay teen murdered

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Jason Mattison Jr. (from Baltimore Sun)
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.

—  admin

A whole new perspective

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Go down to the Cedar Springs strip and ask a few people what issue they think should be at the top of the gay rights agenda. You’ll get a variety of answers, like same-sex marriage rights, protection against discrimination in employment, the right to serve openly in the U.S. military, or the right to adopt children.

Go to any city in Iraq and ask the same question and, if you could find anyone willing to answer, they would be more likely to say the right to not be murdered in the streets for being gay. In fact, you might get yourself killed just for daring to ask such a question.

Attacks on LGBT people in Iraq have been in the headlines for some time now — ever since G.W. sent our military over there to liberate the country from Saddam Hussein. But such attacks are getting even more attention today since the publication yesterday of a report by Human Rights Watch. (Read a BBC article on the HWR report here.)

According to the report, hundreds of gay men have likely been targeted and murdered, since 2004, in what appears to be a coordinated campaign by militias, with the Mehdi Army militia spearheading the campaign and even the police joining in, even though homosexuality is not illegal there. Plus, there are the so-called honour killings carried out by families intent on punishing their own kin in order to avoid public shame.

According to witnesses, vigilante groups break into people’s homes, hauling off those suspected of being gay and interrogating (another word for torturing) them to get them to give up the names of other gays before killing them, then often mutilating the bodies and leaving them on trash piles. And the names of “suspected” gay men and their addresses are often posted on flyers around the cities

I am not saying that we here in this country shouldn’t continue our fight for civil rights. We most certainly do deserve equality, both socially and legally, and we won’t get that if we don’t fight for it.

But as we continue the fight here in our country for the right to legally wed our partners, to adopt children, to serve in the military, to work in discrimination-free workplaces and so on, let’s not forget that our LGBT brothers and sisters in other parts of the world are fighting, quite literally, for their very lives.

—  admin

Tel Aviv shooting update: Killer may not have been ultra-Orthodox extremist

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Last Saturday, over 50,000 people turned out for a demonstration in support of the LGBT community in Tel Aviv. The featured speaker was Israel’s president, Shimon Peres.

Peres has won the Nobel Peace Prize and founded the Peres Peace Center. Former Texas Gov. Ann Richards served on the board of directors until her death.

One 20-year old ultra-Orthodox man was arrested at the rally for posting terrorist threats against the LGBT community on line before the rally. According to Terry Stone, executive director of Center Link, the organization of community centers, the eight youth and one counselor reported hospitalized were expected to remain in the hospital for awhile for physical therapy.

Funds are being collected for the Tel Aviv center to help with the cost of mental health counseling, not just for those wounded, but for others in the community affected by the attack.

No progress in the investigation has been reported, however some evidence points to someone other than an ultra-Orthodox extremist, as is widely suspected. While someone who took the hate speech of the radical right to heart may have committed the crime, the murderer may not be a part of that community:

• The murderer was dressed in black, head to toe. Black reminds us of the ultra-Orthodox dress, but the Orthodox do not dress as the murderer was dressed.

• The murderer was quite accomplished in the use of his weapon. The ultra-Orthodox have a military exemption and, of all Israelis, are the least likely to be marksmen or even to be armed.

• While they speak hate about the LGBT community, there is little actual violence in and around the ultra-Orthodox community. Lots of shunning, but no stoning or beheading.

• The murderer escaped on motorcycle. The ultra-Orthodox don’t run around Tel Aviv on motorcycles.

— David Taffet

—  admin

Lawrence King 'invited' his murder?

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There was an opinion piece printed in the April 1 edition of The Reflector, the newspaper at Mississippi State University, written by Lazarus Austin, that really made my blood boil.

You guys remember Lawrence King? That 15-year-old gay boy from California who was shot to death by a classmate upset because Larry “flirted” with him? Well, Mr. Austin from Mississippi State suggested this week that Larry was the one at fault.

Mr. Austin says he has “two problems with the controversy” (the controversy being all those radicals calling on schools to do more to teach tolerance and crack down on bullying). His first problem is that “people are blowing the situation out of proportion and automatically assuming King’s murderer killed him simply because King was gay. This remind me of how people love to cry racism when someone kills a person of a different race.”

Mr. Austin’s second problem is, apparently, that poor little Brandon McInerney, the 14-year-old charged with a hate crime and murder for shooting Larry King, has had a rough life, and even though he was a good student, he was really just “a fuse ready to explode.” So it was really Larry King’s fault because his “fraternization” and his “imposing his homosexuality on McInerney” just set Brandon off!

He writes: “Although King by no means deserved his fate” (good of Mr. Austin to think so!) “he may have unfortunately invited it.”

There’s more. Read it for yourself here.

There is a link on the page where you can e-mail Mr. Austin, and a place for leaving comments. So check it out. And let Lazarus Austin know what you think. This kind of dangerous idiocy can’t go unchallenged.

—  admin