The People's Record

Hundreds attend vigil for victim of anti-gay hate crime
July 25, 2012

A brutal anti-gay hate crime in Lincoln, Nebraska, drew out more than 500 people to a vigil on the evening of July 22 to stand in defense of the victim and against anti-LGBT bigotry.

In the early morning hours of July 22, the victim, whose name is being withheld, was tortured and mutilated in her home by three masked men. A friend of the victim told the Lincoln Journal Star that the attackers barged in, bound her wrists and ankles with zip ties, cut her all over her body and carved homophobic slurs into her skin, before dumping gasoline on her floor and lighting it with a match.

There is speculation that the men intended to set the victim on fire, but the gasoline didn’t keep burning. The attackers also spray painted “We found u Dyke” on a wall inside the woman’s house.

The victim, naked and bleeding, with her hands still bound, was able to escape and crawl to a neighbor’s house, where paramedics and police were called. “I was in shock,” the neighbor told CNN. “She was naked, her hands were tied with zip ties. All I could see was a cut across her forehead and blood running down.”

The woman had recently lost her job and was spending time volunteering with children, the neighbor said—but “through that job someone let her know that she had no business working with children because she was a lesbian.”

The attack has been classified by police as a hate crime.

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