gay bashings

Which One of These Marines Allegedly Landed the Brutal Blows to Kieran Daly?

As the FBI looks into whether Kieran Daly’s Savannah gay bashing qualifies as a hate crime under the Matthew Shepard Act, you’ll be pleased to know the official police report claims Cpl. Keil Joseph Cronauer, the 22-year-old misdemeanor battery suspect, did not hit Daly. But Cpl. Christopher Charles Stanzel might have!

Cronauer and Stanzel (pictured, L-R) were enjoying some pizza slices early Saturday morning, joking around “with four others”; Daly among them. Then Cronauer, The Morning Calls reports, “found out one of the other men was gay,” thought he “winked at him” and “within minutes, Daly lay on the ground unconscious.”

The account comes from another man and a woman who were sharing pizza with Cronauer, another Marine and Daly, according to a police report that does not state how the people in the group knew each other. Police later charged Cronauer, a 2006 graduate of Parkland High School, and Lance Cpl. Christopher Stanzel with assault.

[…] Cronauer, 22, did not hit Daly, according to the police report [read in full here], which says Cronauer got upset when he found out Daly is gay and demanded, “Did you just wink at me?” When one of Daly’s friends tried to get Daly to leave, Stanzel walked behind the gay man, who in a moment was out cold on the ground, police say.

“Did you just hit him?” the friend, Alison Brennan, told police she asked Stanzel, who was standing over Daly. “No,” the 23-year-old Marine said, according to the report.

So that wasn’t Stanzel and Cronauer who a police officer spotted running away from the scene, and later found out of breath hiding in a vancat lot, right?

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