Couple will spend life in prison for torture, murder of 8-year-old they called gay

LOS ANGELES — The mother of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez and her then-boyfriend will plead guilty to murder and torture charges in the boy’s death, sparing them the death penalty.
KNBC-TV reports that Pearl Fernandez and then-boyfriend Isauro Aguirre will receive life in prison without parole in exchange for their guilty pleas to first degree murder and torture with special circumstances.
KTLA Pearl Fernandez and Isauro Aguirre.

 Both waived their right to appeal and will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

Trans Woman Attacked in Hollywood Hate Crime Speaks Out, Cops Offer Reward

Los Angeles police are offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of four men who brutally assaulted a transgender woman last month.


The Los Angeles Police Department's Hollywood division is offering a substantial reward for information leading to the arrest of four men allegedly involved in a brutal attack on a transgender woman in Hollywood last month. In hopes of identifying the suspect, the LAPD released video and still images of the assault and assailants.

Vivian Diego, a 22-year-old transgender woman, was walking toward the Metro transit station on Hollywood Boulevard at about 2:30 a.m. on May 31 when a group of four men jumped her and began punching and kicking her, Diego says. Diego spent a week in the hospital after the attack.

CBS's Los Angeles affiliate spoke with Diego, whose mouth is wired shut as she recovers from a broken jaw, shattered cheekbone, and two cracked ribs suffered as a result of the attack.

“Right when they see me, they started being malicious, verbally, abusing me verbally with words,” Diego told the station. Mere minutes later, one man shoved Diego from behind while others began beating her. “I was being kicked on and punched on,” she said. “And then, I wake up in the hospital.”

Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime, and offering a $25,000 reward for anyone with information leading to an arrest. LAPD investigators have set up a special email account for anyone with information to contact them: hollywoodcrimetips@gmail.com. Anyone with knowledge of the attack can contact LAPD's Hollywood Area Detective Division at (213) 972-2967, or (877) LAPD-24-7 during non-business hours or weekends.

Despite the assault, Diego says she is resilient. "I'm not letting this incident, this attack, stop me from living my life," she told the station. "As you can see, I'm still fabulous. You guys didn't stop no show."

White Supremacists Use Black-on-White Crime as Propaganda Tool

Long a source of irritation for white supremacists, angry claims of an epidemic of black-on-white crime (often simply referred to as "black crime") have drifted closer to the mainstream since the controversial shooting in Florida of Trayvon Martin, a young African-American male, by George Zimmerman (who has been described in the media as a white Hispanic). Following the assertions, extremists have repeated their claims that a large number of white victims are being ignored. And now even some mainstream commentators have taken up the issue and have used rhetoric similar to that used by the white supremacists to attack the media for allegedly discounting white victims of crime.
White supremacists calls for action against "black crime"

Even as they deny "whiteness" to George Zimmerman, white supremacists have been busy exploiting the controversy caused by Zimmerman's alleged act of self-defense against an African-American. White supremacists have renewed their calls for actions against so-called "black crime," which they equate with hate crimes. Hate crimes, however, have a very specific meaning: they are criminal offenses against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation. White supremacists believe that any crime committed by an African-American against a white person is motivated by race.

On Stormfront, a popular white supremacist Internet forum, one poster recently asked people to join in a planned rally against black crime in Knoxville, Tennessee, scheduled for June 2012. The purpose of the rally would be to protest against new trials for black assailants who allegedly tortured and murdered a young white couple in that city in 2007. At that time, the incident mobilized the white supremacist community, which held rallies and distributed flyers that accused the media of ignoring what they considered to be a heinous hate crime. Police in Knoxville who investigated the crime said that the victims had not been targeted because of their race.

In May 2012, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) announced that it would investigate a number of alleged incidents around the country in which whites were reportedly the victims of crimes committed by black youths or other minorities. In particular, the NSM mentioned an alleged attack against two white reporters by black youths in Norfolk, Virginia, and assaults against white men in Mobile, Alabama, and Baltimore, Maryland. The NSM has called for hate crime charges to be filed in these cases and wrote on its Web site that "if the roles had been reversed and it was a White mob that had attacked a Black citizen, it would have been labeled a 'lynching' by the major media…We have discovered a disturbing pattern of the systematic cover up and refusal of prosecutors to prosecute offenders under these [hate crime] statutes when the perpetrators are Black and the victims are White."   Read More Hate

Black on White

• Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Upset about a racial name-calling that occurred earlier that night, several black men savagely beat a random white man who had had nothing to do with the incident. He slipped away from his attackers, but they forced him to swim into a lake to escape. He drowned. The three men were sentenced to less than a year in jail.
  
• Massachusetts. Four black men decided to murder the next white person they saw. That unlucky soul was a college student from Boston, whom the men stabbed to death.
  
  
• Indiana. A black man was arrested for killing seven white people with a shotgun. He explained that he murdered his victims due to his “deep-rooted hatred” of white people.
  
  
• Miami, Florida. The leader of a black supremacist sect (i.e., the “Yaweh ben Yaweh cult”) was convicted of the murders of several white people. He ordered his followers to kill any and all “white devils.” They killed at least seven white people, bringing back body parts to their leader.
  
  
• North Carolina. Seven black men kidnapped a white woman, raped her, put her in a tub of bleach, shot her five times, and dumped her body. The murderers said they did this for racial reasons.
  
  
• North Carolina. Four black teenagers lured a white, ten-year-old girl into an empty house. “There, they sodomized her, strangled her with a cable wire, and beat her to death with a board. In the past few weeks, the trials in the Tiffany Long case have received extensive coverage in the North Carolina press. But with two of the three defendants already sentenced to lifelong prison terms, and the third now standing trial, the national media have all but ignored the story. Only the Associated Press has reported on the trials, in a single, cursory piece. The AP, of course, failed to mention the race of the people involved — an oversight it seldom if ever committed in the case of Amadou Diallo.
  
  
• Boulder, Colorado. After discovering that one of their members had never had intercourse with a white woman, an Asian gang went looking for one. When they found a white University of Colorado student, the six men gang raped her in their minivan for two hours.   At their trial, “Detectives described the woman’s night of terror, including repeated threats to kill her.“The woman leaped out of the minivan after one of the men raped her. Naked, she sprinted across Lefthand Canyon Road before Steve Yang tackled her, authorities said.“‘They were all screaming at her, calling her names and hitting her,’ Detective Jane Harmer testified.“Yang put her in a headlock and dragged her back into the van, where she was raped repeatedly, Harmer said.“‘It was a free-for-all,’ Harmer testified.“One man threatened to ‘cut and burn her,’ and another put a gun barrel to the back of her head when they released her, Harmer said.
  
  
• Kansas City, Missouri. An Ethiopian immigrant shot two white coworkers — killing one and critically injuring the other — at his workplace, then turned the gun on himself. At his residence, police found a three-page, signed note he had written in which he railed at “black blood sucker supreme white people” for oppressing him and black people in general.
  
• New York City. In a Midtown office building, a white woman was assaulted, raped, and anally raped by a black man who called her racist names during the attack. Police refused to label it a hate crime.
  
• Alexandria, Virginia. A black man walking through a neighborhood went over to a white eight-year-old boy playing in his great-grandparents’ front yard and slit the child’s throat, killing him. A witness says that the attacker shouted racial epithets during the attack, and the main suspect in the case owns anti-white hate literature and had written a note about killing white children. He had been previously arrested for attacking an unarmed white stranger with a hammer. (During the attack, he called his victim “Whitey.”)

Charges Dropped in Transgender Woman Islan Nettles' Murder: What Now?

(Huffington Post)  In the early hours of Aug. 17, Islan Nettles, a 21-year-old transgender woman, was beaten to death. She was attacked across the street from New York City's Police Service Area 6 precinct in Harlem, the life pummeled from her in a fit of violence.

In the days that followed, the police arrested a suspect, 20-year-old Paris Wilson.
According to reports, Wilson knocked Nettles to the ground and began beating her with his fists as she lay helpless on the ground. Witnesses alleged that Wilson's outburst began when he realized that Nettles was transgender, and that he continued hitting her as he hurled transphobic and homophobic slurs at her. The attack ultimately resulted in her death in the hospital days later.
Wilson was charged with misdemeanor assault. Many in the transgender community were outraged. How could such a violent act be considered a misdemeanor?

Yesterday, even the tiny bit of justice that would have come from a misdemeanor assault conviction was taken from us. Judge Steven Statsinger announced that the charges against Wilson would be dropped as the prosecution didn't have clear evidence that Wilson was the man who had committed the crime. Mind you, there were several witnesses at the scene, with multiple people identifying Wilson as the perpetrator. Still, this wasn't enough for Judge Statsinger and prosecutors.
After his arrest, Wilson's mother sought out another man who had allegedly committed the crime. This man offered a confession, though claiming that he could not remember much detail of the incident, as he was supposedly intoxicated at the time of the crime. This was enough to sway prosecutors away from pursuing charges against Wilson, even though police initially believed this man's confession to be false.

Too often, this is what happens when someone dies at the hands of anti-transgender violence. Victims are forgotten, perpetrators are let free, and the world moves on as though nothing happened.
Today is the 15th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day when we can reflect and memorialize those who were so unjustly taken from the world for no reason other than being themselves. We look back on so many lives cut so short.

What happened to Islan Nettles is neither unique nor remarkable. What happened to her happens far more often to trans women of color than we will ever truly know. The official body count this year is 238, though that number is likely a gross underestimate.

There are days to fight on other important transgender-specific issues like housing discrimination, employment discrimination, harassment and media representation. This is not that day. This is the day that we need to look at the violence that so many of our trans sisters of color fall victim to and ask, "What can we do to stop this?"

I wish I had an answer to that. I wish there was something I could say or do to protect the lives of victims past, present and future, but I find myself lost and near speechless. No one should die because of who they are, ever.     Read more Hate

Hate crime charge for California boy accused of setting transgender teen on fire

By Ronnie Cohen

OAKLAND, California Thu Nov 7, 2013 9:36pm EST

(Reuters) - A 16-year-old California boy accused of setting fire to a transgender teen's skirt as the victim slept on a public bus in the city of Oakland earlier this week was charged as an adult on Thursday with committing a hate crime.

Richard Thomas was charged with aggravated mayhem, felony assault and a hate-crime "enhancement" after telling a police officer he committed Monday's attack "because he was homophobic," according to the criminal complaint.

The 18-year-old victim, Luke Fleischman, who was born male but identifies himself as gender neutral and goes by the name of Sasha, remained hospitalized in San Francisco with severe burns on Thursday and was listed in stable condition, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The teen will require several surgeries to recover, according to a website posted by family members to raise money for the victim's medical treatment.

"The intentional and callous nature of the crime is shocking and will not be tolerated in our community," Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley said in a statement.

Thomas stood in a glass cage in Superior Court out of view of observers and told Judge Gregory Syren that his relatives were trying to hire a lawyer to defend him against the charges.

A woman who identified herself as the suspect's grandmother begged the judge for more time to find an attorney. Syren postponed proceedings for entering of a plea until Tuesday and ordered Thomas to remain in custody without bail.

Outside the courtroom, Thomas's mother, who gave her name only as Ms. Jackson, denied that her son was homophobic or that he meant to hurt anyone.

"My son is not a hateful person," she said. "He's not homophobic. He was joking, and he didn't know it would go that far."

"I am very sorry, very sorry for my son's actions," Jackson told reporters, adding that her son, too, was remorseful and was drafting a letter of apology to the burn victim. "I did not raise him that way."

Police arrested Thomas at Oakland High School, where he is a student, on Tuesday after examining surveillance video from the city bus that allegedly showed him setting the victim's skirt on fire.

Tiffany Woods, a liaison between the transgender community and Oakland police, said Fleischman identified as gender neutral or "agender" and was a "well-liked kid."

Trevor Cralle, director of the Maybeck High School in Berkeley, where Fleischman is a senior, described the teen as a "wonderful, exceptional student."

(Reporting by Ronnie Cohen; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Steve Gorman and Ken Wills

New York man charged with hate crimes for seven 'knockout' assaults

New York (CNN) -- A 35-year-old New York man has been charged with hate crimes in connection with seven "knockout" assaults, including attacks on two elderly women and a mother walking with her daughter, police said Saturday.

Barry Baldwin, a Brooklyn resident, was charged with six counts of assault as a hate crime, six counts of aggravated harassment as a hate crime, and other crimes for a spate of attacks between November 9 and December 27 in predominantly Jewish sections of Brooklyn, police said.

Possible 'knockout' game victim: 'The whole group of kids laughed'

On November 9, Baldwin allegedly punched a 78-year-old woman who was pushing a stroller -- apparently as part of the "knockout" assault game, where people try to knock a random stranger unconscious with a single blow. The victim was knocked to the ground.

FBI agent quotes Texas man bragging about 'knockout'

On December 7, he allegedly struck again, punching a 20-year-old woman in the back of the head in Brooklyn.

Between December 21 and December 27, Baldwin allegedly assaulted five more women, including a 33-year-old woman who was walking with her young daughter and another 78-year-old woman.

After the attack on the woman walking with her 7-year-old daughter in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, police released a sketch of the suspect. The mother was punched in the back of the head and knocked down, police said. She sustained minor injuries to her knees and hands. The suspect fled on foot.

Police keep close eye on reports of disturbing 'knocking' game

Baldwin was arrested December 29 by hate crimes detectives canvassing the neighborhoods where the previous attacks occurred, police said. He was charged after witnesses identified him in a police lineup.

At least nine suspected "knockout" attacks have been reported since October in New York, but police have said they see no evidence of a trend.

Authorities have reported similar incidents in New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri and Washington.

Anti-Latino Hate Crimes Rise As Immigration Debate Intensifies

(Huffington Post) Juan Varela was shot in the neck in his front yard in Phoenix, Ariz., last May by his neighbor Gary Kelley. Moments before killing Varela in front of his mother and brother, Kelley yelled, "Go back to Mexico or die!" Varela was not an undocumented immigrant, but a fifth generation American of Mexican descent, said Carlos Galindo, the family's spokesperson in a phone interview.

In May 2009, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father Raul Flores were murdered by members of a Minuteman vigilante group. The child and her father were both American-born U.S. citizens. Leader Shawna Forde broke into the Flores home in Arivaca, Ariz., with two men she recruited to help her fund her splinter Minuteman organization. After the group shot and killed her father, Brisenia pleaded with the Forde and her accomplices, saying, "Please don't shoot me." One of the masked figures then shot her in the face at point blank range, her mother, the lone survivor, said in her testimony. Forde was convicted of first degree murder in February of 2011 and sentenced to death.

Last November, two Mexican nationals, cousins Alex Cauich and Jose Omar Cauich, were brutally assaulted by a group of white men while standing in front of a bar in San Francisco. Witnesses on the scene heard the assailants yelling "run like you ran across the border" during the incident. Last week, three men with connection to a white supremacist group were convicted in the assault. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who worked as a police officer in Arizona and California for more than twenty years, told The Huffington Post that he perceives this crime and others like it to be part of rising anti-Latino sentiments around the country.

Recent studies conducted by the National Institute of Justice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the FBI and the Pew Research Center seem to show that these incidents were not isolated hate events, but part of a greater trend.

The preliminary findings of a congressionally-mandated study by the National Institute of Justice suggest that anti-Latino hate crimes rose disproportionally to other hate crimes between 2004 and 2008. The study estimates that in 2003 there were 426 hate crimes against Latinos, while in 2007 there were 595 nationally. According to the same study, California and Texas saw the most anti-Latino hate crimes, as well as more dramatic increases of such incidents than other states. Data collected by the FBI also indicates a steady rise in anti-Latino hate crimes across the country from 2003 to 2007.

A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit civil rights organization based in Montgomery, contends that the number of "radical right groups" in America -- including hate groups, "Patriot" groups and nativist groups -- increased in 2010 for the second year in a row.Although recent studies indicate anti-Latino hate crimes have been on the rise over the last decade, many believe their numbers are even greater than those reported. Mark Potok, a spokesperson for the SPLC, said in an interview with The Huffington Post that, "one thing to understand is that Latinos, and in particular undocumented immigrants, are among the least likely to report hate crimes because they fear deportation." Read more Hate

Boy’s Killing, Labeled a Gay Hate Crime, Stuns a Town

Lawrence "Larry" King, murdered.

(NY Times) OXNARD, Calif. — Hundreds of mourners gathered at a church here on Friday to remember an eighth-grade boy who was shot to death inside a junior high school computer lab by a fellow student in what prosecutors are calling a hate crime.

In recent weeks, the victim, Lawrence King, 15, had said publicly that he was gay, classmates said, enduring harassment from a group of schoolmates, including the 14-year-old boy charged in his death.

“God knit Larry together and made him wonderfully complex,” the Rev. Dan Birchfield of Westminster Presbyterian Church told the crowd as he stood in front of a large photograph of the victim. “Larry was a masterpiece.”

The shooting stunned residents of Oxnard, a laid-back middle-class beach community just north of Malibu. It also drew a strong reaction from gay and civil rights groups.

“We’ve never had school violence like this here before, never had a school shooting,” said David Keith, a spokesman for the Oxnard Police Department.

Les Winget, 44, whose daughter Nikki, 13, attends the school, called the crime “absolutely unbelievable.”

Jay Smith, executive director of the Ventura County Rainbow Alliance, where Lawrence took part in Friday night group activities for gay teenagers, said, “We’re all shocked that this would happen here.”

The gunman, identified by the police as Brandon McInerney, “is just as much a victim as Lawrence,” said Masen Davis, executive director of the Transgender Law Center. “He’s a victim of homophobia and hate.”

The law center is working with Equality California and the Gay-Straight Alliance Network to push for a legislative review of anti-bias policies and outreach efforts in California schools. According to the 2005 California Healthy Kids Survey, seventh-graders in the state are 50 percent more likely to be harassed in school because of sexual orientation or gender identity than those in 11th grade.

That finding is representative of schools across the country, said Stephen Russell, a University of Arizona professor who studies the issues facing lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual youth.

Mr. Davis said “more and more kids are coming out in junior high school and expressing gender different identities at younger ages.”

“Unfortunately,” he added, “society has not matured at the same rate.”

Prosecutors charged Brandon as an adult with murder as a premeditated hate crime and gun possession. If convicted, he faces a sentence of 52 years to life in prison.

A senior deputy district attorney, Maeve Fox, would not say why the authorities added the hate crime to the murder charge.

In interviews, classmates of the two boys at E. O. Green Junior High School said Lawrence had started wearing mascara, lipstick and jewelry to school, prompting a group of male students to bully him.

“They teased him because he was different,” said Marissa Moreno, 13, also in the eighth grade. “But he wasn’t afraid to show himself.”

Lawrence wore his favorite high-heeled boots most days, riding the bus to school from Casa Pacifica, a center for abused and neglected children in the foster care system, where he began living last fall. Officials would not say anything about his family background other than that his parents, Greg and Dawn King, were living and that he had four siblings. Lawrence started attending E. O. Green last winter, said Steven Elson, the center’s chief executive. “He had made connections here,” Dr. Elson said. “It’s just a huge trauma here. It’s emotionally very charged.”

Since the shooting, hundreds of people have sent messages to a memorial Web site where photographs show Lawrence as a child with a gap in his front teeth, and older, holding a caterpillar in the palm of his hand.

“He had a character that was bubbly,” Marissa said. “We would just laugh together. He would smile, then I would smile and then we couldn’t stop.”

On the morning of Feb. 12, Lawrence was in the school’s computer lab with 24 other students, said Mr. Keith, the police spokesman. Brandon walked into the room with a gun and shot Lawrence in the head, the police said, then ran from the building. Police officers caught him a few blocks away.

Unconscious when he arrived at the hospital, Lawrence was declared brain dead the next day but kept on a ventilator to preserve his organs for donation, said the Ventura County medical examiner, Armando Chavez. He was taken off life support on Feb. 14.

Brandon is being held at a juvenile facility in Ventura on $770,000 bail, said his lawyer, Brian Vogel. He will enter a plea on March 21.

At a vigil for Lawrence last week in Ventura, 200 people carried glow sticks and candles in paper cups as they walked down a boardwalk at the beach and stood under the stars. Melissa Castillo, 13, recalled the last time she had seen Lawrence. “He was walking through the lunch room, wearing these awesome boots,” she said. “I ran over to him and said, ‘Your boots are so cute!’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ ”

She raised her chin and arched an eyebrow in imitation. “ ‘If you want cute boots,’ ” Lawrence had told her, “ ‘you have to buy the expensive kind.’ ” His boots had cost $30.

“So, for Lawrence,” Melissa said to five girls holding pink and green glow sticks, “we have to go get the expensive kind.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 27, 2008
An article on Saturday about the death of an eighth-grade boy in Oxnard, Calif., whose killing is being called a hate crime by prosecutors, misidentified the group that is pushing for a legislative review of anti-bias policies in California schools. It is the Gay-Straight Alliance Network, not the Gay-Straight Alliance. (The network coordinates clubs in California schools that operate under the name Gay-Straight Alliance.)

The article also misstated the margin by which a seventh-grade student in the state is more likely to be harassed in school because of sexual orientation or gender identity than an 11th grader. It is 50 percent higher, not 3 percent. (According to the 2005 California Healthy Kids Survey, nine percent of seventh graders and six percent of 11th graders were victims of such harassment.)