Man Clobbered With Chair at a Chelsea Restaurant in Apparent Gay Bashing
This vicious attack was filmed last night around 11:10 pm at the Dallas BBQ in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. For years, Chelsea has had a very visible gay population. It is a terrible place to go if you hate gay people.
[There was a video here]
(The Instagram video, which provides the clearest picture of the attack, has been deleted. I have posted it above. Oddly, the person who uploaded the YouTube video below, Isaam Sharef, runs the account that hosted the Instagram video, as well.)
Nonetheless, one of the victims, Jonathan Snipes, 32, says that he and his boyfriend, Ethan York-Adams, 25, were specifically targeted because of their sexuality. DNAinfo reports:
At the restaurant, Snipes got a text and needed to leave the restaurant quickly, he said. They got up and accidentally knocked over a drink, he said.
“A table near us audibly started making pretty gross comments about the two of us like, ‘White faggots, spilling drinks,’” Snipes said.
“I don’t let anyone talk to me like that. I went over there and asked, ‘What did you say about us?’” he added.
Snipes said he’s 140 pounds, never thrown a punch in his life and felt he posed no physical threat to anyone at the table, especially the two large men there — one of whom stands about 6 feet 4 inches, according to police.
“I may be a mouthy broad, but I wasn’t going to take it to that level,” Snipes said.
One of the men stood up and escalated the verbal confrontation, Snipes said.
“He turned it into a physical altercation very quickly,” he added.
Snipes says that the man knocked him to the ground and started kicking him in the face while saying, “Take that, faggot.” As a result, Snipes says that one of his teeth was knocked loose, his head was bruised, and cartilage in his ear snapped. He was examined by a medical crew but declined to take an ambulance to the hospital because he’s unemployed and doesn’t have insurance.
His attacker and his attacker’s group fled the scene while Snipes and Adams awaited police and medical attention. They did this because they are fucking cowards who have a lot of nerve calling anyone else a faggot. No arrests have been made.
“We want this to go viral,” the couple’s friend Sarah Meyers told DNAinfo. “We need to find him. My friend could have been killed.”
Here’s more footage of the fight, if you can stomach it:
Oh, and:
An NYPD spokesman said an investigation is ongoing, but that the incident was not currently being investigated as a hate crime by the department’s Hate Crime Task Force.