After the beathing: would faster reporting of the gay bashings in West Hollywood have helped to prevent further attacks there? (Community).

For Trev Broudy, 33, and Edward Ulett, 22, the night of September I passed innocuously enough. As new friends, the two of them spent the evening at Broudy's apartment on Cynthia Street in West Hollywood, Calif.--just hanging out, talking, and joking around while watching The Anna Nicole Show.

Around midnight they decided to call it a night, but Ulett remembered that he needed to return Broudy's parking permit, which he was using to park his car in the neighborhood. The two walked outside, and after they exchanged a hug, Ulett opened his car door and reached for the permit. "That is when I saw the headlights coming at us," he says. "And then a guy came running at us with a bat."

Before he could let out a warning yell, Ulett says, the man with the baseball bat clubbed Broudy on the back of the head. And while Ulett's view was blocked by the car, other witnesses say a second attacker beat the actor on the back of the head with a metal pipe. A third person remained in the driver's seat of the perpetrators' car, witnesses say.

The man with the baseball bat then turned on Ulett, smashing the car windows and beating him with the bat as he tried to drive away. In all, the attack lasted about 10 seconds, Ulett says.

So began a spate of violent hate crimes in the otherwise relatively safe gay and lesbian enclave of West Hollywood. About an hour and a half later and a few blocks away, the trio attacked again, targeting a 35-year-old gay man as he was walking home. And even though residents and authorities mobilized with flyers featuring sketches of the attackers, increased police foot patrols, and an offer of an unprecedented $91,000 reward, the attackers struck again three weeks later. This time they bashed a 55-year-old man--with what is believed to be the same baseball bat and metal pipe--as he walked by himself at 3:30 A.M. near Santa Monica Boulevard. Badly bruised, the man was rescued by a cab driver who happened to be driving by.

Whereas Ulett called police immediately after the attack upon him and Broudy, the other victims, for unknown reasons, either refrained from calling the police or waited several days before reporting the attack, preventing officials from gathering clues that could help them stop another attack. And that raises a new problem for authorities: While wanting to be sensitive to the trauma and fear experienced by gay-bashing victims--especially those who are still closeted--it's clear that it's necessary to drive home the importance of immediately reporting these attacks.

"We have an obligation to ourselves and our community to report these hate crimes," says Roger Coggan, director of legal services and public policy for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. "But let's not blame the victim. It is often difficult to deal with the trauma of the hate crime and at the same time deal with coming-out issues."

Psychologists say that hate-crime victims can be in such a delicate state of mind that they do whatever it takes to protect themselves. "The most important thing may be how to maintain their safety, and they may do this by not going to the police and by staying anonymous and not exposing themselves to a system that may not be helpful," says Emily Pitt, coordinator of the violence recovery program for Boston's Fenway Community Health Center.

Ulett says he understands the complex mixture of emotions that might keep others silent following an attack. He escaped the attack with little physical injury but says, "The next week I felt shock, and I felt all those things--anger, depression, and a bit of guilt--about what I could have done differently." His emotional state was compounded by the fact that he had come out to his parents only a few weeks before the incident, he says. (Broudy, who was initially in a coma after the attack, remained hospitalized until October 10.)

Don Mueller, an openly gay deputy and liaison for the Los Angeles County sheriff's department, also acknowledges the reluctance some gay people may feel about reporting an antigay attack. "In years past--and still today, in some parts of our country--[gay people] have been targets of harassment and discrimination at the hands of local law enforcement," he says. "But today, at least in West Hollywood and many other parts of our country, this has changed. When victims and witnesses do not call us immediately, it makes it difficult for us to catch the suspects before they possibly hurt someone else."

On October 2, officials announced the arrest of three men in connection with the September beatings. The men--identified as Larry Walker, 29; Vincent Dotson, 18; and Torwin Sessions, 19--were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and attempted robbery. Sessions had been jailed since September 2 on other, unrelated charges.

In fact, all three suspects had been arrested the morning of the first attacks, but authorities didn't have enough information---clues that might have been gathered if the second attack had been reported immediately--to charge and jail them in connection with the bashings. As a result, two of the men were released at that time. On October 3, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office announced that it would not file hate-crime charges against the men.

Whether this recent rash of hate-motivated attacks in West Hollywood is just an aberration or points to a larger trend is unknown. Either way, it's certainly not unique to the Los Angeles area or to gay people. In San Diego, for example, sever al attackers stabbed or bludgeoned a total of four men while yelling antigay epithets on September 6 and 15. Then in West Hollywood on September 15, two Jewish men were surrounded and beaten by a group of 15 people who chanted, "Kill the Jews!"

"At a time when our country is at war, that is a time when verbal hostility and hate crimes rise," says Progga Choudhury, lead victims' advocate for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center's antiviolence project. "That can include hostility on any group that is perceived as the outsider--Muslims, Jews, and gays."

Regardless of the numbers of hate crimes and the reasons they are committed, community leaders say they need to augment their education efforts within the community. "We can ask the police to protect us more and do education with society, but at the same time, we have to do everything we can for our own personal safety," says AJ Davis-DeFeo, public policy coordinator for the Center, San Diego's gay and lesbian community organization.

In addition to a rally held in late September protesting the hate crimes, Davis-DeFeo says her group has been handing out flyers with safety tips for walking at night and has asked cab companies to make themselves more available around gay nightclubs. "This is not just about the gay and lesbian community," she says. "Anyone can be targeted, and we all have to stand together against hatred of any group."

That's something that Ulett certainly relates to as well. He had never seen education materials regarding hate crimes before he was attacked and, in his short experience as an openly gay man, hadn't thought much about how vulnerable he is. Now, however, he thinks about it often, particularly when he sees revelers on their way home from the bars along Santa Monica Boulevard. "You think to yourself, `I hope you know you need to take precautions when you come back from the bars; you need to be cautious.'"

Quittner also writes for Business Week and the New York Post.

The debate over hate

Were the West Hollywood attacks a hate crime? The district attorney doesn't think so

When the Los Angeles County district attorney's office announced October 3 that the suspects in the three antigay attacks in West Hollywood would not face hate-crime charges, residents immediately went from holding vigils for the attack victims to staging protests against district attorney Steve Cooley.

"Our entire community in West Hollywood, including the sheriff's department, is extremely disappointed," deputy sheriff Don Mueller told the Los Angeles Times. "Based on our interview with the suspects and the information that they admitted to, we believe there is evidence to go forward with a hate-crime charge.

Nevertheless, Cooley's office charged the suspects--Larry Walker, 29; Vincent Dotson, 18; and Torwin Sessions, 19--with assault with a deadly weapon and attempted robbery charges. A hate-crime charge would have significantly increased the penalty the men would face if found guilty of the attacks. Each of them has pleaded innocent to the charges.

Cooley maintains that the victims' sexual orientation was not a motive in the attack against Trev Broudy and Edward Ulett. Local officials aren't convinced, though. Los Angeles city council members have asked Cooley to file hate-crime charges against the men, and the West Hollywood city council on October 7 passed a resolution calling on state attorney general Bill Lockyer and U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft to investigate the beating as a hate crime.

Cooley wasn't budging, though--at least not by press time. "I put my faith in the talented, ethical, and highly professional prosecutors who have carefully evaluated the facts of this case," he said in a statement. "We cannot, as ethical prosecutors, give in to political pressure."