Gay Student Brutally Beaten; 4 Arrested

A gay University of Wyoming student was brutally beaten, burned and left tied to a wooden ranch fence like a scarecrow, with grave injuries including a smashed skull, authorities said. Four people have been arrested.

A passerby found the victim, Matthew Shepard, 22, near death half a day after the attack. He was unconscious and his skull had been smashed with a handgun. He also appeared to have suffered burns on his body and cuts on his head and face. The temperature had dropped into the low 30s. On Friday, he was in critical condition on a respirator at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colo.

Police arrested two men and two women. Police Cmdr. Dave O’Malley said that robbery was the chief motive but that the victim was chosen in part because he is gay and that the defendants made anti-gay remarks after the attack.

Shepard told friends he had suffered two other beatings recently that he attributed to his open homosexuality. Some fellow students said they had no doubt the latest beating was also a hate crime.

“That has to do with the fact this is a cowboy place. People aren’t exposed to it. They’re too close-minded,” said Alicia Alexander, a sophomore.

Shepard was found Wednesday evening by a man on a bicycle who at first thought he was a scarecrow or a dummy because of how he was tied to the fence.

“He’s a small person with a big heart, mind and soul that someone tried to beat out of him,” said his uncle, R.W. Eaton. “Right now, he’s in God’s hands.”

Russell Arthur Henderson, 21, and Aaron McKinney, whose age was not immediately available, were charged Friday with attempted murder, kidnapping and robbery. They were ordered held on $100,000 cash bond.

Chastity Vera Pasley, 20, a student, waived her arraignment and was ordered held on $30,000 cash bond on accessory charges. Kristen Leann Price, 18, was expected to be charged as an accessory next week.

Police accused the two men of luring the victim from the Fireside bar, a campus hangout, by telling him they were gay.

O’Malley said the three drove off in McKinney’s truck late Tuesday or early Wednesday. The two men are accused of beating Shepard in the truck, then beating him some more after tying him to the fence about a mile outside Laramie. O’Malley said Shepard’s shoes and wallet were taken.

The two young women are accused of helping the men dump bloody clothing, the officer said. He said the two men made anti-gay remarks to the two women, who later told police about the crime.

O’Malley, a 25-year veteran of the police force, said there had been a few hate crimes over the years, “but nothing anywhere near this.”

Laramie, with a population of 27,000, is a Western-tinged college town about 50 miles west of Cheyenne, the state capital.

Shepard spent some of his time growing up in Casper but studied around the world and had recently lived in Denver. His parents live in Saudi Arabia, where his father works as an oil rig safety inspector. Shepard’s parents were on their way to Fort Collins.

Efforts to pass hate-crime legislation in Wyoming have failed repeatedly because critics have said it would give homosexuals special rights. However, Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer said Friday that he is “outraged and sickened” by the crime and said the state needs to enact a hate-crime law.

“More rural states are known for having a less tolerant, more aggressively hateful political structure and social structure,” said Lester Olmstead-Rose, executive director of Community United Against Violence, a gay-rights group in San Francisco. “If there’s a feeling that you can get away with it, you might just try.”

He said that as a result, many gay people flee rural and suburban areas and move to cities, even though the level of anti-gay violence is high even in New York, San Francisco and other metropolitan areas.