Assailant Sentenced to 8 Years in Anti-Gay NYC Attack

Convicted assailant Daniel Aleman received a sentence of eight years for his part in the brutal beating of a gay man outside a New York deli more than a year ago, the New York Daily News reported on Dec. 14.

Aleman, 27, and Daniel Rodriguez, 22, carried out the assault. The two men set upon 50-year-old Jack Price when Price stepped out of a deli in Queens early in the morning on Oct. 8, 2009. The attackers shouted anti-gay epithets as they punched and kicked Price, delivering a beating so severe that the older man spent weeks in the hospital with serious injuries, including a broken jaw, a punctured lung, and a lacerated spleen. The two attackers then stole Price's wallet. Aleman addressed the court at his Dec. 13 sentencing, saying that he was drunk at the time of the attack and robbery.

"I'm very sorry for what I did," said Aleman, who pled guilty last week to charges of robbery as a hate crime, and received the sentence of eight years plus five years of supervision after his prison term on Dec. 13. "I was drunk and I was under the influence," Aleman added. "I made a very big mistake."

Rodriguez similarly pleaded guilty. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 21, 2011, a Dec. 14 Associated Press story reported.

The attack sparked a rally against hate crimes in Queens on Oct. 17, 2009, an earlier EDGE article reported. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, among other political figures, attended the rally, which was organized by openly gay schoolteacher Danny Dromm, now a member of the New York City Council.

"We're here to say enough is enough," Dromm told EDGE during the rally.

The EDGE article noted that a series of anti-gay attacks had taken place in Queens prior to the beating Price suffered. "Trinidad Tapia and Gilberto Ortiz allegedly beat Leslie Mora with a belt buckle as she walked home from a Jackson Heights nightclub in June" of 2009, the article reported. "And Nathaniel Mims and Rasheed Thomas face hate crimes charges after they allegedly attacked Carmella Etienne with rocks and empty beer bottles on July 8 as she walked home from a store near her St. Albans apartment."

The article also cited the fatal attack in Brooklyn in late 2008. Two men attacked a heterosexual Ecuadorian immigrant, Jos� Sucuzha�ay, because they mistook him for a gay man.

The wave of anti-gay hate crimes that has swept New York in recent years prompted Sharon Stapel, executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, to point to hate speech directed at gays and other minorities. Such speech is especially acute in election years, and a corresponding rise in bias-motivated violence reportedly accompanies politically motivated hate speech.

"That kind of hate speech," said Stapel, "gives people license to believe that it's completely appropriate to be violent towards folks because of their sexual orientation or gender identity." Stapel made her comments before AVP's Courage Awards at the Prince George Ballroom in Manhattan on Oct. 18, an Oct. 26 EDGE article noted. "There's a direct connection. What we're seeing as the LGBT civil rights movement advances in very meaningful ways, the backlash becomes more severe."

"Although the climate may be changing, as long as there are people spewing hatred towards our community, people will interpret that as license to hurt us or a license to torment us," said former AVP executive director David Wertheimer, who was on hand at the same news conference.

New Yorkers, and the nation, were shocked at the vicious anti-gay assaults carried out last fall by a gang in the Bronx. Nine members of the Latin King Goonies suspected that one of their recruits might be gay, the Associated Press reported Oct. 8, and allegedly attacked the 17-year-old youth on Oct. 3. The gang beat the teen and sexually assaulting him with a plunger handle. A 30-year-old man whom the gang suspected the youth was involved with sexually was also targeted by the gang, and assaulted in much the same way as the teenager was. The older man's brother was also assaulted in a home invasion undertaken by the gang.

"These suspects employed terrible wolf-pack odds of nine-against-one, odds which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told the press in the aftermath of the attacks.

The attacks in the Bronx took place only a few months after a July 7 incident on Staten Island in which a gang of about 40 young men and women attacked a gay couple. One of the gay men was left beaten and bleeding in a parking lot, according to a subsequent EDGE article from Oct. 21 that reported on the paucity of leads in the crime.

Another attack took place in the Stonewall Inn, the West Village establishment at the center of the historic Stonewall riots. Two men--Matthew Francis, 21, and Christopher Orlando, 17--reportedly beat a gay man as he stood at a urinal in the bar's restroom, according to an Oct. 4 EDGE report.

The same EDGE article also reported that an anti-gay attack took place in Chelsea on Oct. 1, when several assailants, including Andrew Jackson, 20, set upon two gay males after seeing them kiss each other goodbye on the street.