Taken from the
Chicago Tribune:
The two women clutched each other, pinned against a car by as many as 10 men who taunted them for being gay and took turns punching and kicking them on the dark street.
“It was punches, kicks, everything being thrown at us,” said one of the women, 23. “We just held each other until somebody said, ‘Here come the police.’ ”
Police have labeled the attack a hate crime and have charged one man so far. The rest remain at large.
The
attack occurred late Saturday night as the women walked down North
LeClaire Avenue in the South Austin neighborhood on the West Side.
A
man they knew from the neighborhood started following them, the woman
said. Earlier that night, the couple had passed him as he stood with
other men. As has happened before, the woman's masculine dress prompted
anti-gay slurs, she said. The woman's girlfriend, 25, told the men to
stop, in vain, the woman said.
Now, as the man
followed them, he kept shouting slurs and daring the woman to fight, she
said. “Tell your b---- to stop looking at me,” the man told the woman's
girlfriend, whom he knew from high school.
The
woman said she did her best to ignore him but he kept following. Her
girlfriend tried to reason with the man, asking him to leave the couple
alone, the woman said.
But then a second man
came up, cursing both of the women, and the first man took a swing and
punched the woman, she said. The couple said they fought back and other
men quickly joined in, dragging the women apart.
The
couple struggled to get back together, pressed against a car as the
beating continued and no one came by to help, the woman said. “I didn’t
think we were going to make it out,” she said.
Finally,
one of the men said the police were coming. The attackers, laughing,
fled in one direction and the women went the other way. Both women had
lost their shoes in the scramble, and someone had ripped one of the
victim’s shirt off. The men stole their phones and cash.
No
officers arrived, and the couple ran back to the woman's building and
asked a neighbor for a phone to call for help. Bruised and bleeding from
the nose and mouth, the woman said she passed out and woke up as
paramedics were working on her in an ambulance.
At
the hospital, doctors took a CT scan of her head and X-rays of her ribs
and legs, she said. They found swelling but nothing broken. Her
girlfriend was not as seriously injured.
Terry
Glover, 24, of the 0-100 block of North Parkside Avenue, has been
charged with two counts of felony hate crime and two counts of felony
robbery. He is being held on $1 million bail. Police said they are still
looking for the others.
The woman said she has left the neighborhood.
“It
really shouldn’t matter who I like or who I love,” she said. “I should
be able to walk the streets wherever I want to go and talk to whoever I
want to talk to.”
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