Hate Crime in Lansing, Michigan
Eastern High beating may have been gay bashing
By TODD HEYWOOD
The brutal attack at Eastern High School last month may have been an act of gay bashing, possibly resulting from homosexual panic.
Lansing police Detective James Gill and Ingham County prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III have both confirmed that homosexuality appears to have been a factor in the severe beating of the 16-year-old student on Sept. 17. The victim remains hospitalized.
Police arrested Jeremy Lee, 17, who was charged with assault. He is now in Ingham County Jail.
Authorities said the victim is believed to be gay. When asked if the victim’s sexual orientation was the motivation in the Sept. 17 attack, Gill said, “Yes. That is correct.”
Authorities said the attack apparently stems from a verbal confrontation Lee and the victim had last year, when they were both students at Walter French Academy, the defunct charter school. “I think the defendant made an innuendo that the victim might be gay,” Dunnings said of last year’s incident, “and the victim came back with, 'That's OK, I suck your dick.'”
Lee claimed he went to Eastern on the day of the beating to pick up academic records and only saw the other student by accident. Gill said Lee told him he had gone to Eastern “to drop out.”
“He said he heard music coming from a room,” Gill continued. “He went to the room, and the victim came out and brushed up against him. The accused started thinking about what had happened at Walter French and started hitting him.”
But a school official disputes Lee’s contention that he was at Eastern to pick up records. “He was not a student at the school,” Mark Mayes, a spokesman for the Lansing School District, said. “There were no records pertaining to him at the school. He had no legitimate reason to be at the school.”
Jeffrey Montgomery, executive director of the Triangle Foundation in Detroit, said “gay panic” could be involved. Lawyers argued in the Matthew Shepard and Jenny Jones cases, among others, that that the defendants became violent after their sexual orientation was questioned.
“From what’s known about this incident, it seems clear to me it is a very good case of gay panic,” Montgomery said. “We all know gay panic is a potent motive to do damage, sometimes irreparable damage, to victims.”
The Triangle Foundation monitors and tracks hate crimes and other acts of discrimination against the gay community in Michigan.
Lee's attorney, Greg Bell, says he does not believe that homosexuality was a factor in the attack. He said Lee has told him what the motivations were, but Bell declined to discuss them.
Lee has been charged with assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder. He is being held on $100,000 bail pending an Oct. 13 court appearance.
The victim, who was in a medically induced coma until recently, is awake but unable to talk, Gill said. The victim does recognize his mother and grandmother, added Gill, but remains in critical condition.
The attack was caught on the school’s security cameras. The assault has led district officials to implement a plan that requires students to keep their student IDs visible.
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I agree with you on the gay panic defense, and the “twinky defense” rates right up there with it. At the end of the day, the bottom line is that this person did damage to another person. Does anything. other than feeling like your life was in danger, justify that?
In the Matthew Shepard case, it wasn’t that the court would have refused to allow ‘gay panic’. The court simply said that there were no laws on Wyoming's books that would accommodate that charge. That is why it was disallowed, not because it was deemed to be unreasonable.
In the case of Dan White in the assassination of SF Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, Dan claimed what would become known as the “twinky defense”. He ate junk food days before killing the two men and the court argued that that clouded Dan White's judgment. We'll never know if that was completely successful. The playback recording of Dan sobbing while making his testimony had some on the jury crying for him as well.
One thing I know is that the more gay people who come out and the more society gets used to our presence, the less likely it will be for anyone to claim “gay panic” - even people within our own community.
‘Gay panic’ is a specious and simplistic justification for a non-premeditated assault based on sexual orientation. That anyone, especially someone in the GLBT community, would suggest it is a valid justification is offensive. In fact; in the Shepard case, the court refused to allow Messrs McKinney and Henderson to argue a ‘gay panic’ defense.