Bronx Gang Beats and Tortures Gay Recruit, 2 Others, Cops Say
Queers Are Self Made
recruit/story?id=11844460
Eight members of a Bronx gang who allegedly beat and tortured a new
recruit they thought was gay and two other men in separate attacks early
this week have been arrested on numerous charges, including hate crimes,
police said.
The alleged attacks came amid heightened attention nationwide to anti-gay
bullying after a string of suicides last month were attributed to
harassment they had suffered.
The members of the gang, the Latin King Goonies, are being held on charges
of burglary, robbery, assault, menacing, unlawful imprisonment and
criminal sex acts, which are being added as a hate crime, police said. One
other was also being sought in the incident.
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the first of the alleged
assaults occurred at about 3:30 a.m. Sunday.
In the first incident, gang members allegedly forced a 17-year-old
potential recruit for the street gang to an empty apartment in the Bronx
that they used for parties and sex, Kelly said.
"He was thrown into a wall, made to strip naked, hit in the head with a
beer can, cut with a box cutter and sodomized with the wooden handle of a
plunger," the commissioner said.
The alleged attackers, apparently angry he was gay, yelled anti-gay
insults and questioned him about his contact with a 30-year-old man,
according to police.
The teen was eventually released by the attackers and instructed not to
tell anyone, police said. He then walked to a hospital where he was
treated, but he reported that his injuries were from a robbery, according
to police.
The gang members then attacked another 17-year-old also thought to have
had a relationship with the 30-year-old and then the older man as well,
police said. They allegedly lured both to the same apartment with a story
that there was a party there.
The second teen was allegedly assaulted at about 8:30 p.m. on Sunday,
according to police.
When the 30-year-old arrived about an hour later, the nine gang members
allegedly stripped him to his underwear and tied him to a chair opposite
the other teen, who they forced to burn the man with cigarettes, police
said.
They allegedly beat the 30-year-old, forced him to drink 10 cans of the
malt beverage Four Loko that he had brought with him, and sodomized him
with a small baseball bat, according to police.
"These suspects employed terrible wolf-pack odds of nine-against-one, odds
which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they
were despicable," Kelly said.
"This was not part of an initiation," he added. "This was a reaction to
the fact that they had engaged in homosexual activity."