Attackers Enter Guilty Plea in Bias Beating

A brutal beating that left a gay New York man with serious injuries has led to admissions of guilt from the two men who reportedly carried out the assault.

Queens resident Jack Price, 50, was severely beaten in the early morning hours of Oct. 9, 2009, by two men. Daniel Rodriguez, 21, and Daniel Aleman, 27, pled guilty to robbery as a hate crime, the Associated Press reported in a Dec. 1 article. The assailants face eight years in jail.

In admitting their guilt, the men said that they had called Price anti-gay epithets. They then kicked and beat Price, leaving him with a broken jaw and broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a lacerated spleen. Price spent several weeks in the hospital following the attack, and told the media that he thought he was going to die of his injuries.

The attack sparked a rally against hate crimes in Queens on Oct. 17, 2009, an earlier EDGE article reported. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, among other political figures, attended the rally, which was organized by openly gay schoolteacher Danny Dromm, now a member of the New York City Council.

"We're here to say enough is enough," Dromm told EDGE during the rally.

The EDGE article noted that a series of anti-gay attacks had taken place in Queens prior to the beating Price suffered. "Trinidad Tapia and Gilberto Ortiz allegedly beat Leslie Mora with a belt buckle as she walked home from a Jackson Heights nightclub in June" of 2009, the article reported. "And Nathaniel Mims and Rasheed Thomas face hate crimes charges after they allegedly attacked Carmella Etienne with rocks and empty beer bottles on July 8 as she walked home from a store near her St. Albans apartment."

The article also cited the fatal attack in Brooklyn in late 2008. Two men attacked a heterosexual Ecuadorian immigrant, Jos� Sucuzha�ay, because they mistook him for a gay man.