New York Man Fatally Stabbed in Possible Anti-Gay Hate Crime
A 28-year-old gay man was fatally stabbed after he and his friends were accosted for dancing at a Brooklyn gas station.
A 28-year-old man was stabbed to death following an altercation between two groups at a New York City gas station. Police are investigating the incident as a possible anti-gay hate crime.
The stabbing, caught by a video surveillance camera, occurred around 11 p.m. on Saturday at a Mobil station on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood, reports the New York Post.
Based on the camera footage, four shirtless Black and Hispanic men were gassing up their car. Two were dancing in their swim trunks. They were confronted by another group and engaged in a heated conversation, with both groups exchanging words.
The surveillance camera shows the two groups disperse temporarily. It then shows them confronting each other again, with a physical fight breaking out in the background.
During the fight, one of the four men was allegedly stabbed by a member of the other group.
The stabbing appears to have been caught on the surveillance footage, as both the victim and alleged stabber can be seen scuffling on tape, but the view of the full fight is partially obstructed by onlookers and cars, as well as the gas station building itself.
According to the New York Daily News, the victim remained on his feet after being stabbed, seemingly going into shock, as a crowd of onlookers gathered around.
The victim has been identified as 28-year-old O’Shae Sibley, a Philadelphia native who had moved to New York City three years prior and resided in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood.
Sibley was openly gay, a professional dancer well-known in New York’s ballroom scene, and was part of an all-queer dance group, Vogue 4 #BlackLivesMatter, which had performed at Lincoln Center.
According to police, the chief suspect in the case, who is Muslim, told the victim and his friends that he was offended by their scantily-clad dancing due to his faith, and asked them to stop. The alleged assailant, reportedly a 17-year-old, according to New York’s WPIX, is seen in a black T-shirt with red shorts in the surveillance footage.
While it is unknown exactly what words were exchanged between the two groups, Summy Ullah, a witness to the crime, claimed that some appeared to take offense to one of Sibley’s friends dancing in a pair of small tight swim trunks that witnesses claimed was “underwear.”
“They were saying, ‘Oh, we’re Muslim, so don’t do this in front of me,'” Ullah told the Daily News. “From that I think it looks like a hate crime. Nothing else was going on. They were only dancing.”
Police responded to a 911 call at the gas station around 11:15 p.m. and discovered the victim bleeding on the sidewalk, according to the NYPD. Sibley was rushed to Maimonides Medical Center, but died of his injuries shortly afterward.
Multiple outlets report that police with the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force are investigating the stabbing as a potential bias-motivated crime.
According to WPIX, some witnesses claim that the 17-year-old suspect, who fled down Coney Island Avenue and has not yet been arrested, works in a smoke shop around the corner from the gas station.
Police went inside the smoke shop as part of the investigation into the stabbing. But a man inside the shop told the Daily News that the store was not connected to the incident.
Regardless of the alleged assailant’s connection to the smoke shop, other witnesses told WPIX that the 17-year-old suspect has caused trouble at the gas station before, frequently comes in to use the bathroom, and has an attitude with the workers.
Sibley’s friend, Malik Berry, who was not present at the gas station to witness the stabbing, told the Daily News that his friend was “a representation of what…gay Black excellence could represent and what different facets it can come in.”
“O’Shae was multi-faceted, possessed a lot of talent and passion and a huge heart,” Berry said. “He loved to sing, he loved to dance, he loved to act, he loved to model.”
Sibley and many of his friends were flamboyantly gay, according to some friends and neighbors. His next-door neighbor, Beckenbaur Hamilton, who is 51 years old and also gay, told various news outlets that he had tried to warn his younger neighbor that being perceived as overly flamboyant could put him at risk of attack.
“These are people that don’t live here,” Hamilton told the Daily News. “They don’t know the neighborhood. I’m just saying this for their own safety because I’m gay, too. You have to be careful how you present yourself.”
“We have to live stifled,” he later told WPIX. “We live here in a community where we have to pretend to be somebody else.”
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