The friend of a Northern Virginia man who was killed last week claims he may have been targeted due to his sexual orientation.
Police found the body of 24-year-old Jose Escobar Menendez, of Winchester, on the roadway along Emerald Point Terrace, near Winding Road, in Sterling, Virginia, around 3:30 a.m. last Wednesday.
Authorities have not yet revealed the cause of death in the case.
“This remains a very active investigation, and at this time the motive is unclear,” Kraig Troxell, a spokesman for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, told theΒ Loudoun Times-Mirror. “There is no indication there is a threat to the community.”
No information on a possible suspect has been released by police at this time.Β
But a woman, going by the Twitter name @lesliecobenas, who describes herself as Menendez’s friend, says he was gay and that she fears he may have been the victim of a hate crime.
In a now-deleted tweet, she claimed that Menendez’s body was in “very bad shape,” but declined to say how he died.
“We know it was a homicide, but no one has any idea what his whereabouts were that night or with whom,β she said in the deleted tweet.
“He was murdered & we believe it was due to his sexuality…. We think he met up with someone off of a dating app.”
The woman told theΒ Times-MirrorΒ in an interview that Menendez was an “amazing friend.”
“He was so sweet — always happy and cheerful,” she said. “HeΒ was always that person to hype you up. He just wanted everyone to have a good time.”
A GoFundMe page has been set up for Menendez’s funeral costs, and had raised more than $12,000 as of Monday evening.
The organizer of the page, Ricky Alvarenga, says he is a cousin of Menendez and has asked for respect and privacy for the family.Β
“We are as a family completely devastated and broken and the last thing that we would ever expect was to have to be making accommodations for this tragedy,” he wrote.
“Which this is the reason I am fundraising to help out the most that we can during the time that was already devastating for us.
“Please, we appreciate any help and from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much. #JusticeForJose.”
Two members of the Aryan Knights prison gang successfully pulled off a headline-grabbing escape from the custody of Idaho prison officials before murdering two men, including a gay man with whom one of the men had previously been acquainted.
According to the Boise Police Department, on March 19, Skylar Meade, a prisoner at the Idaho Maximum Security Prison, was transported to Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise to be treated for self-inflicted injuries. He was discharged just after 2 a.m. on May 20.
While the 31-year-old Meade was being transported from the hospital, Nicholas "Moose" Umphenour, a former Maximum Security Prison inmate, opened fire and shot two Idaho Department of Correction officers. Umphenour and Meade then fled the scene in a gray sedan.
David Hanbury, a professor from a Baptist university was reported missing while attending a conference in Orlando, Florida. He was later found dead in a popular gay sauna.
The 37-year-old Hanbury was an associate professor and co-chair of the psychology department at Averett University, a small Baptist university in Danville, Virginia.
He was attending the Southeastern Psychological Association Conference in Orlando, and was last seen alive on the evening of March 15 at the Miller Ale House around 7 p.m., according to a Facebook post from his brother, J.J. Hanbury.
The United States is now seeing over 200,000 syphilis cases annually, the highest figure since the 1950s.
Imagine the voice of Golden Girlsβ Sophia Petrillo saying, βPicture it, United States 1951, I Love LucyΒ was kicking off its first season, super glue had just been invented, and there were 140,000 syphilis cases reported across the country.β
By 2000, however, decades of public health advocacy and medical advancements, such as the use of antibiotics in early treatment, had cut down cases to just 32,000 per year.
So, what happened? Why are the numbers worse now than they were 24 years ago?
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