Sakia Gunn Remembered

By Keith Boykin, in sexuality
Tuesday, May 11 2004, 11:34PM

A year ago today, Sakia Gunn was killed on the streets of Newark, New Jersey. A few months after the murder, I interviewed Sakia's mother, family and friends for a magazine article that was never published. Sakia never lived to see the past year of gay triumphs. She never saw sodomy laws repealed, same-sex marriage legalized or Britney and Madonna kissing on national television. At 15, she never even lived to see her senior year in high school. She was killed because she dared to be herself: a young black lesbian. Today, on the anniversary of Sakia's death, I look back and remember.

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LaTona Gunn is wearing a solemn expression on her brown skinned face as she opens the front door to the gloomy drizzle outside. She escorts a reporter inside the house through a dark vestibule crammed with baby carriages and into a crowded living room lit by a single exposed bulb from a lamp with no shade. Almost methodically, she sits upright and prepares herself quietly for the questions she knows will come.

Barely filling her petite-sized v-neck shirt and jeans, it's hard to believe this thin 33-year-old single mother has borne four children. It's also hard to believe this quiet young woman has become such a vocal figure recently in her Newark, New Jersey community. But in the past year, Gunn has given birth to one child and buried another. Last February, she gave birth to Kyre, her first son out of four kids. Then in May, her eldest child, Sakia, was murdered on Mother's Day.

Sakia Gunn was not like most girls in her neighborhood. She refused to wear pink even as a young child. Her mother laughs when asked if Sakia played with dolls. When they were given to her as toys, she immediately cut off their hair, she says. For as long as anyone can remember, Sakia preferred baggy jeans and a T shirt over dresses and skirts. In fact, it took LaTona some time to convince her daughter to wear a still large size 32 jeans instead of the huge sizes she was accustomed to wearing.

Sakia also had a weak spot for her grandmother. When her grandmother, a devout Jehovah?s Witness, wanted to take Sakia to church one day, Sakia actually put on a dress but insisted that her grandmother pull the car as close to the door as possible so she could sneak in without being seen by the neighborhood kids. When her grandmother arrived, Sakia sprinted out the door and into the car.

Her grandmother also persuaded Sakia to put on ear rings and a pink teddy bear sweatshirt for a family photo taken a few years ago. The photo now sits on the mantle of the fireplace as LaTona Gunn stares at it blankly.

LaTona also remembers a conversation she had with her daughter when Sakia was just 11 years old. "We were sitting on the porch talking, and she said, 'Ma, I don't like boys.'" That was when Sakia first told her mom that she was gay.

Unlike some parents, LaTona was not shocked by the disclosure. ?I told her that that she was young and still had time to figure it out, but whether or not she liked girls didn't make a difference to me.? A couple years later, they both knew for sure that Sakia was gay. The rest of the family knew too. Sakia was dressing like a boy, borrowing clothes from her older male cousins, and hanging out with them as they checked out pictures of pretty girls on the Internet.

As a young mother, LaTona Gunn knew it would be difficult for her lesbian daughter to find a support network. Nearly 70 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youth report experiencing some form of harassment or violence in school, and they are three times more likely to attempt suicide than other youth, according to the National Mental Health Association.

LaTona was grateful when Sakia met a few close friends who dressed like she did and found an understanding teacher and basketball coach named Shani Baraka. But Sakia also found comfort in the bright lights of the big city across the river.

With no place to hang out and be accepted in their own community, Sakia and her friends occasionally got permission from their parents to take the train 25 minutes away to New York City. On the way to the train station, they passed by downtown Newark streets filled with the signs of a struggling black community -- check cashing shops, shoe repair stores, beauty supply houses, hardware stores, and abandoned buildings.

From there, they rode the elevated train from one culture -- largely black and working class, to another ? a gay-friendly multicultural mecca. They passed over factories, warehouses and old industrial plants on the ride to New York, where Sakia and her friends emerged on Christopher Street to see restaurants, cafes and quaint little shops in the heart of New York's historically gay district.

The afternoon skies were clear on Saturday, May 10 when Sakia arrived to a mild spring day in New York. She passed by revelers outside a black gay bar called Chi Chiz and walked down Christopher Street to a newly renovated pier overlooking the Hudson River. Sakia's friend Valencia Bailey remembers the cars rolling down the street that day blasted the tune of a new song called "Uh Oh" by Lumi Dee, and the two girls laughed, joked and danced along to the infectious beat.

After hours of chitchat, walking, dancing and laughing, the girls took the train back to Newark after 2 o'clock on Sunday morning. Instead of waiting for the bus at the train station as they normally did, that night they decided to walk three blocks up Market Street to catch the bus at the bus stop. When one of the girls hopped in a taxicab, the rest of the girls planned to get in too, but for some reason Sakia wanted to take the bus.

Sakia, Valencia, and another girl Kamiya walked to the bus shelter at the intersection of Broad and Market streets. During the day, this is one of the busiest intersections in the city, a place where street corner preachers heel passersby and young people stroll the blocks wearing baggy jeans and huge white T shirts that fall to their knees.

At 3:30 in the morning, however, the corner was empty and the police booth directly across the street was unattended. Just then, two men pulled up in a white station wagon. "You girls looking for some fun"

"No, we're gay," the girls replied. Hanging out the passenger window, a visibly outraged Richard McCullough began yelling obscenities at the girls. The driver parked the car by the street corner. The two men, wearing white T-shirts and blue jeans, opened the car doors and approached the girls menacingly.

Valencia describes what happened from there. "He walked up to Sakia. I'm standing on the right side of Sakia looking at him in his face," Valencia says. "The driver picked up a bottle so I raised my fist, and he dropped the bottle." A moment later, "he grabs Kamiya and puts her in a headlock." Kamiya fell to the ground and then got up out with a stomach pain. The man ordered Sakia to come to him, but Sakia did not move.

"He turns back around and whips out a switchblade and puts in on the back of her neck," Valencia says. "Kia breaks loose. He went forward toward Kia." The man then plunged his knife into the back of Sakia's neck. "She runs behind me and starts taking off her shirt. Her wife beater went from white to red. I ran toward her and she went into a state of shock. Kia, Kia. Come on. Get up. You have to get up," Valencia yelled. Sakia did not respond.

Valencia said to herself, "I'm gonna kill him." But it was too late. The men quickly retreated to their car and slammed the door to drive away. When she heard the door close, Valencia had the presence of mind to get the license plate number, run back to Sakia to comfort her and then flag down a motorist in a minivan, who agreed to drive them to the hospital.

As Valencia caressed her dying friend on the way to the hospital, Sakia's body suddenly gave out. "Blood just came gushing out of her chest like a water fountain and I grabbed it and put pressure on it," Valencia says. "I'm like, 'come on, Kia, we're gonna make it, we're gonna make it'" she says. But as they arrived at the emergency entrance to University Hospital, Sakia turned and looked at Valencia one last time. Her eyes slipped into the back of her head. She drew her last breath and died in Valencia's arms.

Black Homophobia

Sakia Gunn was one of the 1,300 victims of antigay violence reported to the FBI each year. Although many hate crimes are not reported, a growing number of the high profile cases that are reported involve black-on-black violence.

On August 12, 2002, the bullet-riddled bodies of 18-year-old Ukea Davis and 19-year-old Stephanie Thomas, each born male but dressed as a female, were found in the front seat of Thomas?s Toyota Camry in Southeast Washington, D.C.

On November 3, 2002, Morehouse College student Gregory Love was searching for his contact lenses when he looked into an occupied shower stall in his dormitory. He apologized for the mistake, but the enraged student in the shower left the bathroom, came back a few minutes later with a baseball bat, and struck Love repeatedly, leaving the bloody body on the bathroom floor. Despite the horrific act of violence, a student at Morehouse told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, "A lot of people believe that he deserved to get beaten up if he was looking in the shower stall."

On December 22, 2002, 47-year-old Nizah Morris, a black transgender woman, was walking near the corner of Walnut and 15th Street in Philadelphia when she was beaten with a crowbar. Passersby found her lying on the street in a coma and she was taken to the hospital, where she died two days later.

A week later on New Year's eve, 21-year-old Gregory Beauchamp was walking with two friends near the corner of West Liberty and Vine Street in Cincinnati. A group of young black men pulled up in a Cadillac and shouted. "Fuckin' faggot-ass bitches!" After taunting Beauchamp and his friends, one of the passengers in the car pulled out a gun, pulled the trigger and fatally shot Beauchamp in the chest.

Some activists wonder if these homophobic attackers were acting with the implicit endorsement of the black community. Homophobia has become an integral part of black culture, they argue. Successful black recording artists like DMX and Brand Nubian have popularized homophobic music. In a recent DMX song, the rapper DMX threatens homosexuals with violence. "I show no love, to homo thugs," he raps. "Empty out, reloaded and throw more slugs."

Religion also helps to reinforce homophobia, according to Rev. Kathi Martin, senior pastor of GSN Ministries in Atlanta. Martin, the daughter of a minister in New Jersey, became pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal church in Decatur, Georgia in 1994 but left the denomination three years later after she was reprimanded for affirming a same-sex commitment ceremony. They told me, "You're ahead of your time," she said.

Martin accuses the black community of "guilt by silence and omission" and she is shocked by the lack of outrage over the murders of black gays and lesbians. "If we see violence anywhere, we ought to be speaking out about it," she says. She believes too many churches do not encourage us to love our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, "so when we see that kind of violence we?re not triggered to respond to it."

"If we call ourselves Christians," Martin says, "this is what Scripture teaches us: loving God as we love thy neighbor." She says all of our neighbors should be loved. "There's no list of people that are exempt from that."

The Phone Call

Sunday, May 11 was supposed to be a happy occasion for Sakia Gunn's mother LaTona. It was Mother's Day, a day in which her children might surprise her with a card or a gift. Instead, LaTona awoke that morning to a phone call from the hospital. Sakia had been stabbed. LaTona quickly grabbed her things and rushed to University Hospital with Sakia's grandmother.

"I was thinking that Sakia might have been in her first little fight," she remembers. "I never was even thinking that she might have lost her life." She had even planned to tease her daughter about the importance of protecting herself. She had it all worked out in her mind. "I was ready to get to the hospital so I could mess with her. 'Uh huh, you got your first battle scar,'" she was going to say. "'Now, you're gonna listen. When you're out in the street, you better carry this mace.' But I couldn't get her to carry the mace for nothing."

When LaTona arrived at the hospital, she passed by a large contingent of police cars and thought to herself that it "must have been a serious fight." For the first time, she worried that Sakia might be going to jail. Although Sakia had never been in trouble before, LaTona figured that Sakia and another girl had gotten into a fight and Sakia could have stabbed the other girl in self defense.

Looking back on it, LaTona reflects, "I wish she would have been going to jail." Her eyes well up and she steadies her face. "Then she'd be here today." But Sakia was not the perpetrator of the crime that night.

Inside University Hospital, the staff asked LaTona to wait for the head nurse. She stood there for a few moments with her mother until the nurse appeared. When the nurse finally arrived, ten doctors walked behind her. "Are you Sakia Gunn's mother" Yes, she replied. "I'm very sorry," the nurse said. "We did everything we could, but we couldn't save your daughter. She passed away."

It was the moment every mother fears. LaTona was in disbelief. She assumed it was a mistake, that they must have been looking for another girl's mother instead of her. "I was feeling for the next people they had to go tell that their daughter had died. I figured my daughter had just gotten stabbed and she was just getting some stitches. It never dawned on me that she would be dead."

But when LaTona turned around, her own mother had suffered a heart attack and collapsed on the floor. "I tried to tell my mother they got the wrong people. "Don't get your nerves all worked up.'" After tending to her mother, LaTona went back to see her daughter. She does not say what took place in that room, but when she left she was still in denial about her daughter's death.

"I watched everybody walking out the emergency room crying, and I just sat there," she says. The seriousness of the tragedy still eluded her. "It wouldn't register with me," she explains. It finally struck her back at home when the phone rang with sympathy calls. Then she couldn't take it anymore. "I'm sitting in Sakia's room on her bed and once the phone started, I packed up my stuff and came over to my sister's house." LaTona and her kids stayed with her sister for a week and a half.

One of the people who called LaTona was Sakia's favorite teacher, Shani Baraka. She came over to the house and sat with LaTona to help her through the difficult time. In the months after the murder, LaTona suffered through nights when she could not sleep and days when she could not eat. She moved from place to place, finally moving out of her house and moving in with relatives to find peace.

Meanwhile, Sakia's murder had made such an impression on the kids in the school and on the young people in her community that 3,000 mourners came out to pay their respects at the May 15 funeral. Two-thirds of those people were young gays and lesbians, LaTona says. "They were coming out the woodwork," she says. "I didn't even know how many young gay people there were in Newark."

The experience of meeting the kids helped to turn LaTona Gunn into an activist. LaTona went to visit the pier where Sakia spent her final hours. Seeing the hundreds of teenagers hanging out, playing music, and being themselves helped her to understand why Sakia was drawn to the pier. "She was going to a place where she was accepted," LaTona says.

LaTona was also impressed by how "peaceful" it was at the pier. "The kids weren't starting fights," she says, and "if you see two guys holding hands, nobody stared at you." But she had a lingering question to be answered. Why should gay and lesbian kids in Newark have to travel all the way to New York to find a safe space?

Finding A Solution

A few months after the murder, LaTona Gunn wants justice, and she has a clear idea of what it looks like. She wants her daughter's murderer locked up for life, and she wants the mayor to build a community center for young people in Newark.

She may get her first wish. With eyewitness descriptions of the suspect, a license plate number and a police sketch circulating in the city, 29-year-old Richard McCullough surrendered to police on May 15, just moments after a rally for Sakia ended at Newark City Hall.

But LaTona is not happy with the city's response to the community center. Newark Mayor Sharpe James spoke at Sakia?s funeral and promised that he would meet with LaTona to discuss the building of a community center. But four months later the mayor had not called. "The city is not doing anything," LaTona complains.

Just three blocks from the corner where Sakia was murdered, Mayor James sits in his office under the gold gilded dome and gold eagles that guard the main entrance to City Hall. Catherine Cuomo Cecere, the mayor?s director of the department of health and human services, dismisses LaTona?s criticism. "She's grief stricken so sometimes it's a little bit difficult to think beyond the fact that she's lost her daughter." The mayor's office explains that the city does not have the money to build a community center on its own but is looking for resources to do it.

LaTona is not convinced, but she might never have spoken to the mayor again had it not been for a tragic twist in a year of violence for the community. Three months after Sakia?s murder, Sakia's favorite teacher, Shani Baraka, was murdered too, and LaTona was asked to speak at the wake. The Baraka murder, involving the daughter of Newark?s famous poet Amiri Baraka, drew the attention of the mayor and several city officials to the wake. That's where LaTona confronted the mayor again. Mindful of the circumstances of the event, LaTona did not want to cause a scene. She says she simply walked up to him and asked him a question: "Remember me?"

Where Is The Outrage?

Two months after Sakia's death, Professor Kim Pearson at the College of New Jersey wondered why the media had not covered this dramatic hate crime. That?s when Pearson researched the news coverage of Sakia Gunn's murder and compared it to the well publicized coverage of Matthew Shepard's murder five years earlier. The results were shocking.

For the two months after Shepard was killed in 1998, she discovered 507 stories in the major newspapers and broadcast outlets. In the same time span after Sakia?s death, she found only 11 stories.

To the mainstream media, Sakia may have appeared to be just another black kid killed on the street, but her age, gender, race and sexuality actually made her a unique victim. First, her age and gender made the crime unusual. "It's extremely rare for 15 year old girls to be murdered," says Marianne Zawitz of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in Washington.

Next, when Sakia's race is factored into the equation, her murder is even more rare. Of the 13,895 homicides reported by the BJS in the year 2000, the most recent year for which statistics are available, only 12 of them (0.08 percent) involved 15-year-old black females. In contrast, 1,290 murders (9 percent of all homicides that year) involved white men in Matthew Shepard's age range, 18-24. Racial assumptions about the frequency of murder in the black community may have contributed to the disparity in the news coverage between Matthew Shepard and Sakia Gunn. But those assumptions were wrong.

Finally, Sakia's sexuality made the case exceptional. Sakia's age, gender and race already made her killing rare, but when you add her sexuality into the equation as a reason for the killing, her murder may be unprecedented. Sakia was not the victim of a stray bullet or an urban drug crime. She was the victim of a hate crime. And she may have been the first and only 15-year-old black lesbian murdered because of her sexual orientation. That alone made her story newsworthy.

"With anyone that age getting murdered, it often happens at the hands of someone in their age group,? says Clarence Patton, director of the National Coalition of Anti Violence Programs. "That's not what happened here. This wasn't some school mate or neighborhood kid. This was a grown adult man who killed this little girl. And he killed her in part because she was a lesbian, but he also killed her because she was rejecting his sexual advances."

Patton feels that the media and the black community should pay special attention to hate crimes. "Hate crimes are acts of terrorism," he says. "The whole point of them is obviously to do harm to the victims but also this hope that it will impact the entire community that the victim represents." Patton argues that "violence based on abject hatred and bigotry is more destructive to communities than even random violence."

He wants black folk to be outraged. "At the very least, black folks should care more," he says. "We might not be able to control what white folks do to us but we may be able to control what we do to ourselves."

A Family Remembers

Sakia's grandmother has been sitting in the kitchen for an hour while her daughter is interviewed. When the buzzer rings, she is forced to come into the open to answer the door. A blurry image of a blue and white house dress moves quickly to the front door accompanied by the sound of slippers clapping across the floor tiles. As her daughter continues to speak, she unobtrusively sneaks back into the kitchen.

She was so shaken by her granddaughter's murder that she had to be hospitalized after she heard the news, and she has not spoken to a single reporter since that horrible day. But a few moments later, she emerges from the kitchen to speak her piece.

Adjusting her eye glasses before she speaks, the silver-haired woman fits the archetypal image of a black grandmother. As a Jehovah's Witness, she was concerned about Sakia?s sexual orientation, she says, but she knew she could never change her granddaughter and she loved her for who she was. A few minutes later, Sakia?s aunt descends the staircase and sits on the steps. She tells story after story of what Sakia was like.

Sakia used to scrub her sneakers with vinegar to keep them clean, she says. In fact, Sakia used so much vinegar that the house smelled like pig's feet some times. Sakia's aunt particularly remembers a time when her niece was staying with her and used the entire washing machine to clean a single pair of shoe strings. "I'm trying not to be a fusser, and I'm thinking I'm going to sit down and talk to her. I said 'Sakia I'm not working right now,' and tried to explain it to her. She looked at me like, yeah okay, whatever." LaTona interjects: "She didn't care what you said when her shoestrings were dirty."

Meanwhile, LaTona Gunn has walked upstairs twice, first to retrieve a copy of Essence magazine to find a story she read about what to say if your daughter is gay. Next she has brought down a huge cardboard box filled with pictures and mementos of Sakia. Sakia?s sister walks in and LaTona introduces her. "This is Krystal. This is the one Sakia used to put in the stroller. She would throw the doll on the floor and put her in the stroller. And she was a fat thing too." Krystal, who is tall and thin now at 14, smiles. Another sister, 8-year-old Nikyah, shyly walks in too, and everyone is talking at once.

A few moments before, they were quietly spread throughout the house. Now they are all gathered in the living room, thumbing through old pictures and recounting their favorite stories of Sakia's life. LaTona pulls out a paper from a funeral home. Sakia wears a dress in only one of the nine pictures in the 8-page obituary, and that photo was clearly taken years ago.

Sakia's grandmother leaves the room and returns with her own picture of Sakia wearing a blue jacket over a white t-shirt. "This picture I never did like," she says, "but now I can look it. I can't look at the other ones." She explains why she changed her mind. "I never liked that picture because that's the first picture she took that she looked, you know," she stops. LaTona finishes her sentence, "like a little boy." Sakia's grandmother does not like Sakia's graduation photo because it has been used in too many places, including the cover of Sakia's obituary and on the signs for Sakia's vigil.

But LaTona Gunn is not spooked by any of the photos. Instead, she stares at the picture her mother has retrieved. "My daughter had some gorgeous lips," she says. Then she bravely rifles through more photos and pulls out a morbid picture of her daughter lying in her coffin. Sakia's grandmother does not look.

Moving On

A month after an earlier interview, Sakia's murderer has not been put on trial and the community center is no closer to being built, but LaTona Gunn is not giving up. She is riding in the passenger seat of a car driven by her new confidante Laquetta Nelson. After Laquetta heard about Sakia's murder, she started a group called the Newark Pride Alliance and offered her assistance to LaTona. Laquetta is going over LaTona's schedule in the car. LaTona has been invited to a fundraiser, a rally and a conference. She has already traveled to a rally in Boston and she has plans to travel to Philadelphia and Washington as well.

Laquetta believes violence has become too commonplace and acceptable in the black community. By the end of August, there had already been 55 homicides in Newark, a number that could put the city on track to beat the 2002 figures, when there were 68 homicides for the entire year.

"There should be a discussion, a dialogue," Laquetta says. "Why is it that our community is in crisis? The African American community is in crisis all over this country and the leaders that have been in a leadership position have not stood up to speak the truth." Laquetta is making plans for an afternoon rally a few weeks away to be held at the corner where Sakia was killed. She hopes that Amiri Baraka will speak at the rally. "We want it to be an example for the rest of the country to follow," she says.

Slowly but surely, the rest of the country is hearing that message. LaTona Gunn's words have seeped out beyond Newark, and activists across the nation are calling and writing to invite her to speak. Her daughter Sakia was killed not only at the intersection of Broad and Market, she was killed at the intersection of two dead-end streets, between black homophobia and black violence. Now LaTona wants to do whatever she can to protect gay and lesbian youth and to stop the violence in her community.

No mother should have to experience what she has endured, she says. And she has a simple message for those who promote hatred and violence. "You can't judge people," she says. "You can't take matters in your own hands because you don't like how a person is. People should let people be."

Sakia Gunn stories
Life and Death in Newark

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