Last Wednesday night, five white men visiting Seattle allegedly targeted and beat a young man in a bloody gay-bashing on Capitol Hill while yelling anti-gay and racist slurs, according to police records. Sara Jean Green at the Seattle Times reported on their arrest last Friday night.
Today, charging documents obtained by The Stranger describe details of the crime, which has those five men now facing charges of malicious harassment, the state’s hate-crime charge.
“Most disturbing about it is the number of people on one person,” Mike Hogan, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney in charge of hate crime cases, said when asked if there was anything notable or unusual about this case. A witness said there were “actually up to six or seven” assailants but could only identify the five who were charged, said Hogan.
Hogan also pointed out something surprising about the city’s most gay-friendly neighborhood: Because they don’t know the neighborhood, “it’s common to see people not from our area… go up to the Pike/Pine district and offend there.”
This altercation began at about 9:45 p.m. Wednesday night, when a group of men were “hanging out on the street… calling people walking by derogatory hate speech names,” according to records filed today in King County Superior Court. The witness, a bouncer at the Comet, described them as “angry, pissed off,” and ready to “fight with anyone they deemed a member of the offensive terms they were using.”
The victim, a 20-year-old black man, walked past the group and, according to charging documents, “made some remarks back to the group” after they allegedly called him a faggot. The witness said that “when that happened, the group… began repeatedly calling [the victim] a ‘faggot’ and a ‘nigger.'”
Then, according the bouncer, they “swarmed him,” punching and kicking him. The charging papers describe one of the suspects grabbing the victim “around the neck” and “[taking] him to the ground,” where they allegedly continued to punch and kick him. He eventually was able to flee, as the crowd of at least five men “continued yelling at him, still calling him a ‘faggot and a ‘nigger.'”
Police arrived at the scene and took suspects into custody, after which the victim returned to the scene. “He was shaking, upset, crying and had a lot of blood bleeding from a cut on his lip,” say the charges. The suspects were arrested on the scene after the bouncer identified them.
“They certainly didn’t select a very hospitable neighborhood for their idea of a good time,” Hogan says. “And I’m glad of that,” because it means people stepped in to help. “They’re from out of the area. I don’t think they really understood the dynamics of the neighborhood.”
“The thing that’s nice about [this case],” continues Hogan, is that this witness was “proactive, vigilant, made the identifications. We’re really grateful that that happened… Somebody cared, a lot. He didn’t know the victim, but he cared enough to assist the police in identifying the perpetrators. That’s the good news in that story, I think.”
If convicted, these men are looking at sentences of three to nine months, depending on prior convictions, which Hogan says they’re likely to actually serve. “The judges take this really seriously,” he says.