BREAKING HATE: Jose Sucuzhanay, MURDERED, Brooklyn, New York

Jose Sucuzhanay, Murder victim

¨This morning I got a press conference announcement from City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's office which read, in part, as follows.¨

Statement by Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn

Re: Alleged Hate Crime in Brooklyn

I was outraged to learn this morning that two men were assaulted at Kossuth Place and Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, and especially horrified to learn that anti-LGBT and anti-Latino slurs were used by one or more of the assailants - raising this event to the level of a hate crime.

My office is in touch with the family of the victims and offers our prayers. We have also been in touch with the NYPD's Hate Crimes Task Force, and thank them for their immediate response and hard work. We are confident that those who committed this crime will be apprehended. Together we are calling on all who might have any information about this crime to come forward immediately to the NYPD.

Those who perpetrated this crime must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This cowardly display of hate against two innocent men only re-enforces the need to continue to inform and educate the public about the destruction that hate can cause.

We all must open our eyes to the hate that exists around us and work together to fight against those that demonize others and allow stereotypes to lead them to acts of unconscionable violence. We are all partners against hate. When we come together, to stand up, every time we witness an act motivated by hate, we will send the message that we will not stand for the destruction that comes along with it.

Members of the City Council, community leaders, clergy, and I will hold a press conference December 8th at 12:30 pm on the steps of City Hall to continue to stand up for the victims and to speak out against this vicious crime and all crimes perpetrated by hate.
I sought information online and just found this from ABC News:

Two Ecuadorian brothers were beaten, one critically, during an apparently unprovoked attack in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn Sunday morning that may be a bias crime.
The victims were walking home from a bar when they were attacked by three or four men, who jumped out of an SUV, at the intersection of Kossuth Place and Bushwick Avenue at around 3:30 a.m.

The alleged suspects did not say anything as they began attacking the two brothers.

But during the attack, the suspects used anti-Latino and other racial slurs as they beat the Ecuadorian brothers.

There'll probably be more information available in the next few hours.

UPDATE:

One of the two brothers attacked in Brooklyn yesterday has died of his injuries. He was beaten to death with a baseball bat because the attackers thought he and his brother were lovers.

The two brothers from Ecuador had attended a church party and had stopped at a bar afterward. They may have been a bit tipsy as they walked home in the dead of night, arm-in-arm, leaning close to each other, a common tableau of men in Latino cultures, but one easily misinterpreted by the biased mind. Suddenly a car drew up. It was 3:30a.m. Sunday, and the intersection of Bushwick Avenue and Kossuth Place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a half-block from the brothers’ apartment, was nearly deserted — but not quite. Witnesses, the police said, heard some of what happened next.

Three men came out of the car shouting at the brothers, Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay — something ugly, anti-gay and anti-Latino. Vulgarisms against Hispanics and gay men were heard by witnesses, the police said. One man approached Jose Sucuzhanay, 31, the owner of a real estate agency who has been in New York a decade, and broke a beer bottle over the back of his head. He went down hard.

Romel Sucuzhanay, 38, who is visiting from Ecuador on a two-month visa, bounded over a parked car and ran as the man with the broken bottle came at him. A distance away, he looked back and saw a second assailant beating his prone brother with an aluminum baseball bat, striking him repeatedly on the head and body. The man with the broken bottle turned back and joined the beating and kicking. “They used a baseball bat,” said Diego Sucuzhanay, another brother. “I guess the goal was to kill him.”
After the attack, the murderers (described by police as a group of black men) fled the scene in a Honda SUV. Yesterday NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn and a large group of Hispanic and gay rights activists gathered at City Hall to decry the attack.


Joe. My. God., read it all, click here

Anti-Gay, Anti-Latino Slurs, read it all, click here

IRQR Urges the UN General Assembly to Adopt the France Resolution on December 10, 2008, click here

Thanks to Joe. My. God. (at the sidebar)
Thanks to Blabbeando
Thanks to Brooklyn Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn