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The head of Garden State Equality said he fears Newark Mayor Corey Booker and other officials may be downplaying evidence of a possible anti-gay hate crime in the killing of three college students in August. (Photo by Mike Derer/AP)
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HOME > NEWS > NATIONAL NEWS
By: LOU CHIBBARO J COMMENTS
 
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authorities seriously investigate the evidence and not push it aside because they think a hate crime label would cast the victims in a negative light.
“Our patience is really straining,” Goldstein told the Blade. “You don’t have to out somebody to look into the possible perception by the perpetrators that they were gay,” he said. “When officials are so afraid to investigate this as a possible hate crime because they don’t want to out somebody, that implies that there is something wrong with being gay,” he said. “There’s a terrible double standard here.”
Dashon Harvey's father, trong>James Harvey, left, and trong>Mary Harris, wear Dashon's image on shirts as they stand outside Newark police headquarters on Aug. , in Newark, N.J., in this AP file photo. A friend of Dashon’s told the Blade the murder victim was gay.
(Photo by Mel Evans/AP) |
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Paul Loriquet, spokesperson for the Essex County prosecutor’s office, which is prosecuting the six arrested men, said “all angles are being looked at very carefully in terms of a motive.” He said he could not comment further on the case because the defendants’ trials are pending.
He said a grand jury would be convened soon to look into an indictment of the defendants. One or more trials are not likely to begin until January at the earliest, he said. All of the defendants are being held in jail without bond pending trial.
Newark gay activist James Credle was the first to raise questions about a possible hate crime and to challenge the mayor’s office and the police for withholding information about the sexual orientation of at least one of the victims.
Credle and gay activist and blogger Keith Boykin also noted that the murder of the three college students was not the first case in which Newark’s establishment appeared reluctant to talk about the sexual orientation of gay murder victims. The two noted that in 2003, authorities declined to mention that the daughter of poet and African-American political activist Amiri Baraka was a lesbian at the time she was shot to death.
Shani Baraka, 32, and her domestic partner, Rayshon Holmes, 30, were murdered by the estranged husband of Shani Baraka’s sister in a case police said stemmed from an ongoing episode of domestic violence. The husband, James Coleman, 38, has since been convicted of two counts of murder in connection with the case.
Authorities said Shani Baraka and Rayshon Holmes were helping Baraka’s sister in the midst of a messy separation from her husband but did not say whether the husband might have targeted the two women because they were lesbi
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