Gay’s Death Spurs Fears of Increased Violence

The recent murder of a 26-year-old man, shot between the eyes during a street robbery which netted the killers only his leather jacket, has raised concern about what some local activists say is increased violence against homosexuals in the Sunset Junction area of Silver Lake.

Police said, however, that the killing--although unusually brutal--did not appear to have anti-homosexual overtones. Moreover, they say there does not appear to be a surge in “gay bashing” in the Junction, the area around the intersection of Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards that contains five popular gay bars.

Nevertheless, the Feb. 28 shooting of Mario Martinez minutes after he left one of those bars has prompted strong reaction in the large gay community in Silver Lake. That has included a recent protest rally at the Junction, the formation of a neighborhood anti-crime organization and political pressure on Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo. As a result, Woo has scheduled a meeting April 6 between local gay groups and Capt. Noel Cunningham, commander of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Northeast Division.

“I think this is a major concern,” Woo told a community forum last week. That gathering was designed for area residents to meet representatives of various city services, but it was overwhelmed in its first half with angry questions from the audience about the murder and what some said is an anti-homosexual bias among police.

At that meeting was Ron Edwards, who lives and works in the Junction and who is helping to found a new group called the Silver Lake Neighborhood Alliance, which he said is dedicated to increasing security in the area for homosexuals and heterosexuals.

“There is a lot of anger and we want to vent it in the right direction,” said Edwards, who is an advertising executive for On the Go, a gay-oriented magazine. The group’s first goal is to distribute police whistles among residents and to instruct them to sound the whistles if they are in trouble.

Some police officers, however, said they fear that hearing a whistle could make a robber panic and cause him to hurt a victim even if that was not the original intention.

Edwards and some other area residents said there has been an increase in the past year in beatings and muggings of gay men. Yet other gay activists and area businessmen say that violence has not increased, just fear of it, especially because of hostility toward gays raised by the AIDS epidemic. However, all appear to agree that Martinez’s murder roiled emotions more than any previous assault.

Edwards said he himself was hit on the head with a stick, knocked to the ground and kicked by a group of teen-age boys who called him a “faggot” in a neighborhood incident about a year ago. He said he did not call police and thinks that many other such assaults are not reported to police either because of what the victims perceive as an anti-homosexual bias by authorities or a feeling that police response is too slow.

‘Quicker Response’

“I’m not saying the police are dumb of the situation. We would just like a little quicker response to calls,” Edwards said.

Cunningham said he is pleased to meet with gay activists and to assist them in forming Neighborhood Watch groups and said he will assign an extra patrol car to the area for one week beginning Tuesday. But the commander said that reaction to the murder may have gotten out of hand.

“They have this hysteria going within their own subculture that they are being attacked by police, by hoodlums, by society. It’s a siege mentality. There is no pattern of attacks on gays. We haven’t seen any pattern of it as something the gay community should be alarmed about,” Cunningham said, adding that he would monitor the situation. He conceded that some alleged assaults in the Junction may be unreported to police but stressed that it is true of all types of crimes in Los Angeles.

No More Security Guards

Cunningham said the Junction is probably known among criminals as a spot to find victims walking on the street late at night who are likely to have some cash in their pockets. Bar patrons this week complained that the clubs used to hire security guards to patrol the area but stopped a few months ago.

Martinez and his friend Steve Allen left the Detour, a gay bar on Manzanita Street, at closing time and walked to their car around the corner on Gateway Avenue, according to Allen and detectives. Their assailants, two men in their late teens or early 20s and each carrying a handgun, approached on foot from the other direction and so may not have seen the victims leave the bar, police said.

“Who knows? But there is nothing to indicate that this attack was on them because of their sexual preference,” Cunningham said. He said there are no suspects but that investigators think the robbers may belong to a Latino gang from South-Central Los Angeles. Allen said in an interview with The Times that he is sure there were other witnesses to the murder but that fear of being identified as gay stops them from coming forward.

“It seems like a random street robbery,” said Detective Roy Gobel, who is in charge of homicide investigations at Northeast. “It was a vicious, senseless murder.”

Did Not Ask for Money

Allen, 31, said that one of the robbers put a gun to Martinez’s forehead and demanded his jacket, making no mention of wallets or money. Martinez handed over the jacket and the gunman fired, Allen said. Allen said he then bolted and heard a second shot fired in his direction. It did not strike him, he said, and the robbers fled on foot.

Allen said he then came back to Martinez’s body and pleaded with passers-by to get help. No one aided him, he said, and he had to run back to the bar to get the bartender to call for an ambulance and police. Martinez, who was a television producer and former dancer, was pronounced dead an hour later at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital.

Allen, who is also gay, said that the robbers made no anti-homosexual remarks. But he said he thinks that they came to the Junction looking to victimize gays. “I think the kids know that gay bars don’t take credit cards and that the customers usually have to carry cash. And they know we wear fairly nice stuff,” said Allen, who stressed that he would not avoid the Junction.

“They are not going to take the neighborhood away from us,” he said, referring to criminals. “If they think they are, they will have a fight on their hands.”

There is debate among gay activists about the amount of “gay-bashing” around the Junction.

Hope Fair Will Help

John Brown, co-chairman of the Sunset Neighborhood Alliance, agrees with Edwards that violence is on the increase. Brown’s group founded the Sunset Junction Street Fair in 1980 to help ease tensions between gays and Latinos. The fair was held for six consecutive years but was canceled last year because of insurance problems. It is to be revived this year on Memorial Day. Brown said he hopes the fair helps to stop “a real erosion” in neighborhood tolerance.

On the other hand, Richard Labonte, co-founder of the gay-oriented Different Light Bookstore, located at the Junction, said he doubts whether gay-bashing has increased much. “People are suddenly talking about it more because there was one particularly brutal incident,” said Labonte, who is also the Los Angeles editor for Update, a gay newspaper, and who wrote about the Martinez murder.

No Drop in Business

The local bars report that business has not appeared to drop. Said Ken Evans, a bartender at the Gauntlet II: “It takes a lot to scare gay people. It would take an enormous amount of violence to force people back in the closets.”

Meanwhile, Martinez’s friends and relatives mourn him and are angry at police, at the bars, at witnesses who will not come forth and passers-by who did not aid the fatally wounded man. The only consolation, according to friend Gary Bernstein, is that security may increase in the Junction.

“Nothing is going to bring Mario back,” said Bernstein. “So if any good comes out of this, that is a small blessing.”