Written by EdHopper
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14 October 2009
Last Friday, while returning from an early hours trip to a corner store for cigarettes, Jack Price, a 49-year-old resident of the College Point section of Queens was set upon by two men who brutally kicked, punched and drove his limp body into the pavement. The attack, recorded on a surveillance camera intended to deter graffiti, shows the assailants, allegedly, Daniel Aleman and Daniel Rodriguez, 26 and 21 respectively, pummeling Price, dragging him to a curb, kicking and clobbering him, throwing him back into the street and returning seconds later to finish him off with some more blows. Price's family told the New York Daily News that the 130 lbs. victim suffered a litany of wounds, including two collapsed lungs, broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. During a pause in the beating a taxi passed by, the driver perhaps thinking it best not to get involved or even mistaking the men for helping out a drunk who'd stumbled into the street.
The savagery of Price's attack is telling enough, but when one pauses to think that he was left in the street with life-threatening injuries, the callousness of the crime is magnified. If he was not found in time, Price could have died of respiratory failure or blood poisoning all because his attackers deemed his life utterly worthless.
The proverbial wheels of justice have begun to spin. Police arrested Aleman in the city while Rodriguez was brought in by authorities more than 500 miles away in Norfolk, Virginia. Of course, neither have been convicted, much less indicted yet, so it's unfair to say it was them who did it.
One thing however that appears to be the case is that Price was beaten for the sheer fact that he is a gay man. According to family members, Price indicated that prior to the beating, his attackers taunted and stalked him, shouting "faggot'.
It remains to be seen if this was a bias crime, but if Price recalls it correctly, than it most certainly was and the type of crime that begs an important question, which is why would two young straight men get so worked up to the point of murderous indifference to a man's life, simply because he like's men.
What we refer to as bias crimes tend to be carried out by groups of people concerned about an encroachment on their way of life. In 1955, a group of Mississippi hillbillies murdered Emmett Till, a young boy who'd made the grave error of whistling at a white woman. The redneck ethos of the time was that blacks were getting too uppity and would soon come to dominate white life, including white women. In 1977, white families in Boston pelted school bus windows when the city's education department carried out the transfer of white and black students to balance the race ratio in various schools. Similarly, in 1992, blacks in Los Angeles torched Korean-owned businesses and property following the acquittal of police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King. It was the feeling that the verdict was the jump-off point to settle scores against immigrant community who threatened the black way of life.
