A 22-year-old gay man was walking with friend in the Brooklyn neighborhood Bushwick. Brooklyn is one of the five boroughs that comprises New York City.
According to the Daily News, the unnamed victim was wearing a dress. Three suspects, Cody Sigue, 22, Matthew Smith, 21, and Tavon Johnson, 17, came across the pair and began shouting anti-gay epithets. The victims attempted to get away, but the trio chased them. The culprits shot after the two men, striking the 22-year-old in the back.
After a brief foot chase, the culprits were apprehend by law enforcement. The victim was transported to hospital, treated for his injures, and released. Johnson and Sigue face menacing and third-degree hate crime charges; Smith is charged with assault in the first degree.
'It's messed up,' Daquan Ruddock, a 24-year-old a gay man who lives near the crime scene, said to the Daily News. 'That shows how gay people can't walk around in the street without someone saying something or doing something towards them. It's sad.'
Recent figures from the city police department show anti-LGBTI violence doubled from 2012 to 2013. Sharon Stapel, the executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP), suggested in 2013 editorial that heightened sensitivity to violence might be attached to the jump in hate crimes. 'What we are seeing at AVP is an overall greater visibility for the violence that LGBT people in New York City, and across the country, experience every day. We are also seeing increasing reporting of violence, in no small part due to this increased visibility,' Stapel wrote.
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