On August 10, 2016, Larnell Bruce, a black 19-year-old, was run over by a Jeep driven by Russell Courtier, a member of the European Kindred gang, outside a 7-Eleven convenience store in Gresham, Oregon; Bruce died 3 days later. [1] [2]
In March 2019, Courtier was found guilty of murder and hate crime, [3] while his girlfriend Colleen Hunt, who had been in the Jeep with Courtier, pleaded guilty to manslaughter. [4] Courtier was sentenced to life with a minimum of 28 years, while Hunt received a 10-year sentence. [5]
The case was the subject of a two-part BBC Two documentary series called A Black And White Killing: The Case That Shook America. [6] [7]
Gwen Amber Rose Araujo was an American teenager who was murdered in Newark, California. She was killed by four men, two of whom she had been sexually intimate with, who beat and strangled her after discovering that she was transgender. Two of the defendants were convicted of second-degree murder, but not the requested hate-crime enhancements to the charges. The other two defendants pleaded guilty or no-contest to voluntary manslaughter. In at least one of the trials, a "trans panic defense"—an extension of the gay panic defense—was employed. In some contemporary news reports and during the first trial of the perpetrators, Gwen Araujo was misgendered and referred to by her birth name.
The European Kindred (EK) is a prison and street gang that began in the Oregon prison system.
Shirley Winters is a convicted murderer and arsonist from upstate New York. In 1980, she smothered her five-month-old son, Ronald Winters III. In 2007, she drowned 23-month-old Ryan Rivers. She is also suspected of killing three siblings in childhood, setting a fire which killed two of her older children in 1979, and on the day prior to that killed a friend's three children. Per a plea bargain, she cannot be prosecuted for those.
Sean W. Kennedy was a gay American man who was severely punched by a younger man, Stephen Andrew Moller as Kennedy was leaving a bar in Greenville, South Carolina. The punch was so hard that it shattered his facial bones and separated his brain from his brain stem. Kennedy died 17 hours later of his fatal injuries. This attack and Kennedy's death drew attention to South Carolina's lack of a hate crime law and is believed to have contributed to passage of the federal Hate Crime Prevention Act of 2009, for which his mother lobbied. Additionally, Moller served so little time "because of the lack of an applicable Violent Crime Law in South Carolina" at the time, according to the Judge, although this explanation was seen by the LGBT community as merely thinly veiled homophobia.
Rafael Robb is an economist and former professor at the University of Pennsylvania who confessed to killing his wife in 2006.
The Asian Boyz, also known as ABZ, AB-26, or ABZ Crips, are a street gang based in Southern California. They were founded in the early 1990s as part of efforts of protection for Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees from the more numerous American gangs in their localities. According to the FBI, the gang is predominantly Southeast Asian-American, of which Cambodians account for their majority, while Filipinos, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians comprise sizable numbers. With approximately 2,000 members, many are known to have enlisted in the U.S. military through which some were able to use their position to traffic drugs. According to the FBI's 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment, the Asian Boyz are active in 28 different cities, in 14 different states across the U.S.
The Maywand District murders were the murders of at least three Afghan civilians perpetrated by a group of U.S. Army soldiers from June 2009 to June 2010, during the War in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who referred to themselves as the "Kill Team", were members of the 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, and 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. They were based at FOB Ramrod in Maiwand, from Kandahar Province of Afghanistan.
The history of violence against LGBT people in the United States is made up of assaults on gay men, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender individuals (LGBT), legal responses to such violence, and hate crime statistics in the United States of America. Those targeted by such violence are believed to violate heteronormative rules and contravene perceived protocols of gender and sexual roles. People who are perceived to be LGBT may also be targeted. Violence can also occur between couples who are of the same sex, statistics showing that violence among same-sex couples is more common than among than couples of the opposite sex.
James Craig Anderson was a 47-year-old African American man who was murdered in a hate crime in Jackson, Mississippi on June 26, 2011, by 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon of Brandon. At the time of his death, Anderson was working on the assembly line at the Nissan plant in Canton, and raising an adopted son with his partner.
On April 4, 2015, Walter Scott, a 50-year old black man, was fatally shot by Michael Slager, a local police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina. Slager had stopped Scott for a non-functioning brake light. Slager was charged with murder after a video surfaced showing him shooting Scott from behind while Scott was fleeing, which contradicted Slager's report of the incident. The racial difference led many to believe that the shooting was racially motivated, generating a widespread controversy.
On March 20, 2017, Timothy Caughman, a black 66-year-old man, was collecting cans for recycling in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City when James Harris Jackson, a white 28-year-old man, approached him and stabbed him multiple times with a sword. Caughman later died of his injuries. Jackson subsequently turned himself in to police custody and confirmed that he traveled from Maryland to New York with the intention of killing black men in order to prevent white women from having interracial relationships with them.
Katie Sharon Rough, who was almost eight, died in the Woodthorpe area of her hometown of York in the United Kingdom, on 9 January 2017. She was killed by a girl aged 15 years old at the time, who handed herself in to the police immediately after attacking Rough. Under UK law, Rough's killer was considered a minor at the time of the killing, and so her name was not made publicly known in the subsequent investigation and trial.
Joseph Owan Gibson is an American right-wing activist and the founder of the far-right group Patriot Prayer which has organized protests in Portland, Oregon, and other cities.
On January 10, 2018, 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania sophomore Blaze Bernstein was found dead in a park in Orange County, California, eight days after having been reported missing. He was visiting his family in Lake Forest, California, when he was killed. He had been stabbed twenty times. Two days later, Samuel Woodward, one of Bernstein's former high school classmates and a member of neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, was arrested and charged with murdering Bernstein. As Bernstein was both openly gay and Jewish, authorities declared that Bernstein was a victim of a hate crime. Five deaths had links to the Atomwaffen Division over eight months from 2017 to early 2018.
The killing of Greg Gunn occurred on the morning of February 25, 2016, in Montgomery, Alabama. Gunn, a 58-year-old African-American man, was shot and killed near his home after fleeing from a stop-and-frisk initiated by Aaron Cody Smith, a white police officer. Smith was charged with murder and indicted by a grand jury in 2016. The case came to trial in late 2019 following a change of venue to Ozark, Alabama. Smith was found guilty of manslaughter, and, in January 2020, was sentenced to 14 years in prison.