Beating a Gay Man in Oklahoma is Not Considered a Hate Crime

            

In the early morning of June 27, Oklahoma City-based real estate agent Christian Council, a 28-year-old gay man, returned to his apartment complex after a night out with friends.

Before he made it to his front door, Council, who says he’s never been in a fight, was beaten, bloodied and branded with physical and emotional scars.

"It was terrifying," he said. "My body was in shock while it was happening, and getting those types of blows to the head and the face, my whole body started going numb. I could feel my head snapping back and forth with each blow, but it got to the point where I couldn't feel anything anymore, and then shortly after that was when I just completely blacked out and was unconscious."

In the aftermath, two young Oklahomans could face jail time.

LGBTQ advocacy groups are calling for restorative justice and criticizing Oklahoma for a political climate they say emboldens hate crimes.

Council is seeking therapy.

It all started a few minutes after 2 a.m. on a Saturday just steps away from his apartment, when Council honked his car horn at another driver.

‘Unconscious for a minute or two’ 

On a blacktop lane inside the Fountain Lake apartment complex in Edmond, Council sat behind the steering wheel of his white Infiniti Q50. In the passenger seat was Andrew Martinez, a 26-year-old friend who lives in downtown Oklahoma City and also identifies as gay.

Council was dropping Martinez off at his car before turning in for the night. Ahead of them was a red pickup with its parking lights on, blocking the roadway.

In his telling of what unfolded, Council said he stopped a car length behind the truck and waited for the driver to move along. After a few seconds, Council honked his car horn.

The truck remained parked.

When Council honked again, the driver pulled over so Council could pass. Council parked several spaces away from the truck.

When Council got out of his car with Martinez, two men and a woman were standing nearby. The woman called Council and Martinez “----suckers,” and one of the men used a common slur for gay men, Council claims.

Council said he told the group he honked his car horn because they were blocking the road.

The woman, identified in police reports as Amery Dickerson, 23, of Allen, charged at Council and shoved him into a nearby parked car, Council said. When she came after him a second time, Council said, he pushed her in the face to protect himself.

“When that happened, the two men that were standing with her said, ‘You faggot, don’t you know you can’t hit a girl?’” Council said. “And the driver of the truck and the girl’s boyfriend beat me. Beat me unconscious.”

Council claims 24-year-old Bennett Stone of Edmond took his shirt off and started the beating, with the group yelling gay slurs during the assault.

Council’s friend, Martinez, issued a statement that he tried to help, but one of the men, who is unidentified in police reports, stopped beating Council and restrained Martinez as the assault continued.

“Christian was unconscious for a minute or two,” Martinez said. “I know this because he was not responsive to any of the blows and his body was limp. When Christian came to, he started yelling for help and begging for them to stop. When I was prevented from helping, I immediately called 911 and urged them to send police to the scene ASAP. Shortly thereafter, the police got to the scene and I started to record the situation.” 

Stone and Dickerson were each charged in municipal court with misdemeanor assault and battery. The crime is punishable by a maximum jail term of 90 days and a maximum fine of $1,000.

Council said he suffered a concussion, a fractured rib, two broken teeth and, for days after the attack, continued to discover bruises and cuts on his body.

He said he's had nightmares and believes he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Three weeks after the incident, he helped his grandmother load her vehicle’s trunk in the parking lot of a home improvement store. Two motorists in the parking lot began yelling at each and honking their horns. One exited their vehicle and threatened the other, using profanities. 

“The next thing I know, my grandma’s grabbing me,” Council said. “I was cowering behind the car, trembling like a wet dog because I thought that I was going to get beat unconscious again.”

Checking boxes

On Oklahoma City police incident reports, there are three boxes an officer may check to describe certain crimes — drive-by shooting, domestic violence, hate crime.

In the case of Council’s initial report, officers did not check the hate crime box.

The report says Council’s story of what happened that night aligns with what Martinez shared with police officers.

Stone and Dickerson were “extremely intoxicated and verbally agitated,” according to the report.

There is no indication in the initial report that Stone or Dickerson used gay slurs against Council and Martinez, but Dickerson “aggressively approached” Council while yelling at him.

Council pushed her away in self-defense and she attempted to punch him, according to the report. At that point, Stone approached Council and began punching him, according to the report.

Stone claimed he was defending Dickerson, his girlfriend. Police released them on their own recognizance. They left with “an uninvolved third party.”

In a supplemental police report obtained by The Oklahoman, an officer reviewing his body camera footage said Council reported the unidentified driver of the truck punching him, along with Stone, and that Stone called him the common gay slur.

The driver of the truck was not thought to be involved in the incident at the time and was not interviewed.

Dickerson reported blood coming out of her nose. Stone said he was dropping off a friend at her apartment and saw Council shove Dickerson.

Martinez captured some of the police interviews on cellphone video.

Dickerson is seen motioning to Council and telling an officer: “I’m just trying to go home. I’m not trying to get him in trouble. Like, I get stuff happens. I’m not like, ‘oh, arrest him.’”

In the distance, Stone is shirtless and can be heard telling an officer there was an exchange of words.

“Then I seen him punch her,” he says.

For this story, neither Stone nor Dickerson could be reached for comment.

Council said he doesn’t know Stone and Dickerson. He believes he is the victim of a hate crime.

“You never think something like that is going to happen, let alone right outside your front door,” he said.

Oklahoma City police are reviewing the incident, and it will be presented to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office, police Master Sgt. Gary Knight said.

“There is no hard evidence that suggests the attack was because of his sexual orientation,” Knight told The Oklahoman. “Right now it appears the conflict was because of a truck not moving out of the way of his vehicle. These people did not know each other. There’s no indication they jumped out of their vehicle because of his sexual orientation.”

Council said the conflict escalated because the accused realized he was gay, and he filed a hate crime report with the FBI.

“I want to make this very clear,” Council said. “They got out of their truck because they were mad that I honked at them. They beat me unconscious because I was gay. It was very clear to me that as soon as they saw that my friend and I were gay, or that they assumed we were gay, it was very clear to me that it went from they were mad that I had honked at them, to they were mad that two gay men had the audacity to honk at them, or inconvenience them in any way.”

Reached for comment, Oklahoma City FBI spokeswoman Andrea Anderson said the agency won't comment on the matter.

“In keeping with Department of Justice policy, the FBI does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations,” she said.

Council questions why the unidentified man in the alleged attack was not arrested. He is seeking legal advice over the incident.

“I think it was absolutely a hate crime,” Council said. “But due to gays not being a protected class under Oklahoma hate crime laws, the officers couldn't have checked that box, to my knowledge.”

‘Restorative justice’

According to Oklahoma law, those who are convicted of assault or battery against another person because of “race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin or disability” face a misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony punishable by up to 10 years in state prison for a second or subsequent offense.

A felony offense comes with a fine up to $10,000.

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation must maintain a standard system for state and local law enforcement agencies to report incidents of crime which appear to have been directed against members of “racial, ethnic, religious groups or other groups.”

The LGBTQ community is not listed as a protected class under the statute.

However, OSBI in its annual statewide crime report, which collects statistics from Oklahoma law enforcement agencies, defines hate crime to include sexual orientation.

In 2019, Oklahoma law enforcement agencies reported 37 victims of hate crimes. Six were committed against gay men. Two were motivated by bias against the LGBTQ community in general.

Rebecca Stotzer, a professor at the University of Hawaii School of Social Work, suggested the low number of reported hate crimes against the LGBTQ community in Oklahoma and elsewhere may be because some officers simply have no place to note the data.

Also, hate crime statistics released by advocacy groups are typically higher than law enforcement reports because advocates collect media accounts, Stotzer said.

For example, The Human Rights Campaign, which has tracked transgender homicides in the United States since 2013, says this year is the worst for such murders.

HRC reported in early July there there had been 21 transgender murders so far this year, or just six shy of 27 reported for all of 2019.

“We’ve been very, very poor at collecting data on the murder of transgender people," Stotzer said. “When you look at how law enforcement processes crime scenes, there is not a box to check off. We rely on media accounts.

"It’s really this process where advocates are sending information to other advocates. Is there evidence of a problem? Absolutely. Can we compare one year to another reliably? That’s the part where we have to have more caution.”

At the federal level, the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act expanded the bias motivation definition for hate crimes to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

But in the Sooner State, many among the new generation of LGBTQ rights advocates have not joined the fight to be added to the list of protected people under hate crime law.

To do so assumes hate crimes will happen, without regard to deterrence measures, they say.

“I think that there are some folks in the LGBTQ+ community who have been fighting to be added to that list for a long time,” said Nicole McAfee, director of policy and advocacy for the Oklahoma ACLU.

“For them, there is still value in that fight, but for a group of people, especially for folks of color who are also queer or trans, and from younger activists, the fight has shifted from adding their community to that list. It does not protect folks in the way they want to be protected. It takes away opportunities for restorative justice.”

Criticized by some as a soft-on-crime tactic, restorative justice advocates say the approach addresses harm done by working with both the victim and the offender on resolutions that may not lead to imprisonment.

Restorative justice makes victims whole again while helping solve the mass incarceration problem, proponents say.

“People aren’t hurting LGBTQ2S people because there isn’t enough threat of prison time,” said Allie Shinn, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma. “The DAs' hands are not tied here. If there is a crime they want to prosecute, they have every tool at their disposal to do so”

Shinn agrees with Council, that his alleged attack was prompted by anti-gay bias.

But in a state that sometimes passes laws the LGBTQ community believes are discriminatory — such as Senate Bill 1140, signed in 2018 by former Gov. Mary Fallin to allow religious adoption agencies to refuse service to gay couples — Shinn places some of the blame on Oklahoma’s political climate, which she says is rife with anti-LGBTQ sentiments.

“And what we know is that as long as those sentiments are held so widely in Oklahoma and in the United States, that attacks like what happened to Christian are going to persist," she said. "There’s a real sickness here in Oklahoma and in this country against people that are members of our communities.”

Making a hate crime charge stick can be tough, one Oklahoma City attorney says.

Ed Blau, a former prosecutor and now criminal defense and civil rights attorney, says evidence in such cases may include words used by the accused during the crime, and witness statements.

“It’s a question for the judge and jury as to whether animus for certain groups of people caused the attack,” Blau said.

Council doesn’t want to see his accused attackers go to jail.

“These people can go and sit in a jail cell and just let their hate against queer-trans people build, or they can be forced to go work community service hours alongside the queer and trans community and see the humanity in us, and I think that that kind of restorative justice will do a lot more for our community than jail time will,” he said. 

Acceptance in Oklahoma

When Council returned to consciousness after the attack, he was flat on his back and looking up at the stars. He heard sirens and saw flashes of red and blue bouncing off apartment buildings.

His face dripped blood. Local emergency room personnel treated his wounds.

He couldn’t work because of the scarring on his face and bruising. As a real estate agent, Council said he couldn’t show homes in his condition.

The worst part has been the mental anguish.

“Just having a group of people take control and take over your body like that and make you feel so powerless and so helpless, and prevent your friend from helping you, it has really mentally made an impact on me," he said.

One of the biggest shocks, Council said, was that Stone and Dickerson are younger than him.

“It made me realize that hate and bigotry is a generational thing that trickles down, and there are still young people in this world that are being taught to hate those that are not just like them, and that is what surprised me,” he said.

At the same time, Council has received support from around the world and the Sooner state. More than $17,000 has been raised online for his recovery.

A native Oklahoman, Council said he was a young man in Oklahoma City when he announced he was gay.

“Ever since I came out when I was 19, I have been surrounded by friends and some family that are supportive of me and love me for who I am no matter what, and I have always felt very accepted by the majority of Oklahomans,” he said. “The people that attacked me, in my opinion, they don’t represent most Oklahomans, but it does show that there is still a lot of work left to do, and that our country is still not a safe place to be queer-trans.”