You may remember a sick attack on an 18-year-old teen in New Mexico last summer who was beaten senseless for hours at a party in the rural town of Edgewood. The victim had his face covered, his hands tied, and was beaten all night until the sun came up and left with a concussion, facial lacerations, and bleeding on the brain.
Two of the victim’s four attackers, Cecily Gonzalez and Uriah Smith, were sentenced to a year in a juvenile detention facility and four years in prison, respectively. The other two attackers (pictured) are waiting to be sentenced. William York, one of those attackers said that they wanted to “scare..him straight” and “get him to stop acting the way he was.”
According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, the victim has suffered additionally since the attacks: “Teasing and bullying that had already begun in high school became worse after the beating. ‘People were coming up to him and saying, ‘gay’ and ‘queer,” his younger sister said. ‘No one should be punished for the way they are. My brother is gay. I never looked at him as being different because of it.’ He had to stop attending school, she said.”
To add to the trauma, the victim has also developed Huntington’s Disease, which according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders is “a genetic disease that causes degeneration of brain cells and can lead to uncontrolled movements, loss of intellectual faculties and emotional disturbance.”
Said the victim’s mother: “I still feel all this pain. It’s been a living nightmare.”
Two sentenced in beating of gay teen in Edgewood [santa fe new mexican]
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