Halifax gay rights activist beaten to death outside bar

[Swede]

A well-known gay rights activist in Halifax is dead after being beaten as he was leaving a popular gay bar Monday night.

Raymond Taavel intervened when a man he was with began arguing with another man, who was yelling at the pair as they left Menz Bar. Witnesses said the man was yelling homophobic slurs.

"He was consistently using the word faggot. That's what drew my attention to the situation in the first place," witness Wolf Engelberg told CTV Atlantic. Engelberg was in his bedroom, which overlooks the scene of the beating, when the incident took place.

"There was a blatantly homophobic slant to the things in which he was saying and it was very clear that his primary issue was one with the man's sexuality."



Read more: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20120417/halifax-gay-activist-death-120417/#ixzz1sMBfuLcp

[lonestarnot]

1. Sadness.

[teddy51]

2. I hope that they prosecute this POS to the fulliest extent of the law. There is no excuse

for something like this to happen. IMO if anyone doesn't like or approve of GLBT people, walk away. Lets hope that Crown will rule this as a hate crime!

[Rex]

3. Horrible, so did I read that the suspect

was already being 'held' for something by the police and was given a 1 hour leave? This is so sick, wtf is wrong with people?

[Posteritatis]

9. He was a long-term psychiatric patient

The cops don't give leaves when they're holding people.

[Rex]

11. I did not think they did, thank you.

Wow this is beyond sad.

[Posteritatis]

12. It really is

That mainly added an extra layer of ugliness to the whole thing. There was an immediate, large vigil on the site yesterday (it might not have cleared yet; I'm too far from the neighborhood to readily check) that didn't bring any of that attitude to the table though; most people in town are more stunned than anything else.

[Rex]

14. I can imagine, that was a short but vile

outburst of sudden and lethal violence from a deranged person. I didn't want to go read the article, but I did and saw his picture and that made me cry. He looks so young.

[PDJane]

4. I forget that these people are out there........

I live in downtown Toronto, just south of boys' town, and there's not much of this on the streets here.

I am shamed and disheartened.......

[Posteritatis]

13. There isn't much of it here either

Halifax has a (somewhat) undeserved reputation as a violent city; on the other hand, this happened in a neighborhood that's had a "go here to die" reputation that I've never exactly felt unsafe walking through most of the time.

It's definitely a freak incident instead of a theme for the city, but that doesn't make it suck any less.

[chollybocker]

5. "beaten to death"

That is seriously fucked up. Even bears, wolves, and sharks don't hate like that.

[flvegan]

6. Why did nobody intervene?

Popular club...witnesses.

Bah, passiveness. But, I don't know the whole story.

Thanks for posting, Swede.

[Posteritatis]

8. The attacked assaulted a friend of the victim, who intervened

So someone did intervene; it just went really poorly for them. By the time anybody else was able to get involved, the victim was already fatally injured and the assailant was already trying to get away. The police were there and got him within minutes, but the whole thing happened very fast.

[Canuckistanian]

7. Oh, shit

This is going to be HUGE tomorrow when it hits the morning media.

Thanks for posting.

[Posteritatis]

10. It's definitely dominating the day in town, to say the least

I'm kind of irritated that the reactions I'm seeing outside of Halifax are mostly boiling down to a two-minute hate for the mentally ill as a monolith, though. Talk about taking the wrong lesson from the whole situation.

[Canuckistanian]

15. That's not what I'm hearing

Most people are talking about the homophobic aspect. It's really making an impact here in Ontario among my friends.

[Posteritatis]

16. Yeah, locally there's a fixation on the psych aspects

The really classy people are making it about First Nations people generally, though they're at least getting shouted down.

Pretty much everyone's taking it for granted that the homophobic aspects were just straight-up unambiguously beyond the pale; that was actually a bit of a pleasant surprise for me given how socially conservative Nova Scotia is by default. I'm not arguing on that count, of course, though I wish the civility level was equally high across the board here.