Just because gay rights activists say the murder of 29-year-old sailor August Provost on the Navy’s Camp Pendleton base in Southern California was a hate crime, military brass would like to put it out there that they’ve got zero indication it was.
Found shot dead in a guard shack in the early morning hours Tuesday, Provost lived his life more openly than some gay sailors afraid of Don’t Ask Dont’ Tell would. He was open about his sexuality on his Facebook and MySpace pages, and his boyfriend (yes, he had one of those too) Kaether Cordero said lived an out lifestyle. And he complained to family and friends before his death that he was dealing with harassment on the base.
Now Capt. Matt Brown, a Navy public affairs director, says, “There is no evidence or information that suggests this is a hate crime.” What’s more, the Navy says it can’t confirm there Provost was harassed, which is not the same thing as declaring he was not, indeed, harassed.
Thus far, investigators have released one “person of interest” while another is in custody.
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And while the investigation is still under way, Navy brass doesn’t appear even willing to entertain the idea Provost’s murder had anything to do with his sexuality. That’s what these soundbite-friendly statements to the press are for: Turning the story in the media to sanitize it. Except Capt. Brown says there is no evidence or information suggesting this was a hate crime. Perhaps he has not phoned Provost’s family?
MORE: Some personal details from Provost’s MySpace page, where he lists himself as “in a relationship.”
Nov. 6, 2008, blog entry: “I just am going to say a few words. I miss my boyfriend and I am missing all my family back at home… LOVE YOU ALL… Miss you KAETHER…”
Provost:
Showing off his abs:
With his brother:
With his siblings:
MORE: CNN reports: Rep. Bob Filner says he was on the base hours after Provost’s murder, but Navy leadership didn’t even mention the incident to him — before railing against DADT.
AlwaysGay
Complete bs, another heterosexual coverup. August was murdered because he was gay, it was a hate crime.
Dabq
Why is this even on this site? On other gay sites with informed readers there has been outrage and compassion and demands of a federal investigation. The posters here could care less.
BrianZ
@Dabq: What, disappointed that you’ve not had the opportunity to label someone as racist yet? Seems that’s about all you’re good for here on Queerty, other than dragging that cross around that you’ve strapped to your back. You don’t fit in here so why bother?
Marius
Just what kind of evidence would they need to prove it was a hate crime? “Faggot” spray painted on the walls and the murderer(s) coming forward and saying yes I (we) did it because he was gay and we don’t like that?
I’m beginning to dislike heterosexuals. They can’t be trusted and are bad for morale.
BrianZ
@Marius: What sort of evidence indeed. They don’t seem know who committed the crime or the circumstances surrounding it yet they know enough that it wasn’t a hate crime? Smells like a big load of horseshit to me.
TANK
So evidence is as subjective as taste in ice cream, apparently.
ben
Don’t those homophobes fools realize that this ingrown hatred on the part of the other recruits (murderers) and the subsequent murder could possibly give them the best case they’ve ever had for not letting gays in the military? Is this painfully obvious to nobody else?
Michael @ LeonardMatlovich.com
Such immediate declarations “before the votes are counted” aren’t new to the military or civilian authorities for that matter. But particularly the military because they don’t want to be accused of failing to administer the “Don’t Harass” part of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass.”
Over the years since DH was added after Barry Winchell’s gruesome murder at Fort Campbell where blatant homophobia was rife…and a decade since Clinton issued Executive Order 13140 that added a hate crimes enhancement to the Universal Code of Military Injustice [yes, that’s right, in the upside down world of DADT, military gays technically have more protections than civilian gays]…studies have repeatedly demonstrated that the Pentagon has done a lousy job of enforcing it.
Technically, one can ask your superior for help if you’re being harassed WITHOUT conceding/”telling” that you are gay. Not everyone who is harassed as gay is gay. Winchell didn’t consider himself gay but was murdered because his killer thought he was.
But fear of triggering an investigation anyway, in addition to the fear of being denounced as a “cry baby” about whatever in a hyper “masculine” environment, often works against the individual until it’s too late.
[img]http://www.leonardmatlovich.com/images/247_1-943185-bbm-HAPPY.jpg[/img]
Bill Perdue
This is the second murder caused by Bill Clinton’s DADT. He championed and signed DADT, the codification of military bigotry, into law. The first conformed murder victim was of PFC Barry Winchell was in 1999. The army was very lenient on his killers. One served 7 years. The CO at Ft. Campbell was exonerated of charges that’s his base was a hotbed of homohatred and then promoted.
DADT is christian military bigotry made law by a bipartisan Congress at the urging of Democrat Bill Clinton. Clinton did the same with DOMA. Bush and the Republicans have their own bigoted agendas and empowering violent thugs is something Bush did as much as Clinton. That’s why both refused to repeal Clintons DADT and DOMA and that’s why Obama and the current Democrat majority in Congress refuse to repeal them.
Obama successfully appealed to christer bigots and got their votes last fall at the expense of Same Sex Marriage – SSM – in California. He means to keep them no matter the price. For us it’s a blood price. The people who urged a vote for Obama have a lot to answer for.
LGBT servicemembers will continue to suffer from official and unofficial intimidation, harassment and violence until Bill Clintons DADT is repealed.
[img]http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:-gJ4KPkkm6zhoM:http://www.notesonvirginia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/clinton-bus.jpg%5B/img%5D
Michael @ LeonardMatlovich.com
RE “Clinton’s DADT”—
Mr. Perdue always has a sticky purse full of factual distortions to try to justify his REAL mission which has NOTHING repeat NOTHING to do with DADT or any other gay rights issue. He’s hidden away his direct appeals for people to join the Labor party or some other moth eaten Socialist Worker Party cell but he’s still trying to convince the gullible to dump the Dems and Repugs and every other party except his. But his tape loop that homophobia in the military is the fault of President Satan er Clinton and trying to exploit this poor guy’s death in the process is one of the most shameful. The gay version of Fred Phelps, if, in fact, Perdue is gay.
The first fact, of course, is that a formal ban on gays in the military goes back to WWII…BEFORE BILL CLINTON WAS BORN.
Then, one incident alone, among many over decades, and one with many apparent similarities to this one, proves Perdue no better than a grave robber to serve his slimy political ends.
In the spring of 1992…note, before, Bill Clinton had even secured the Party’s nomination…. Petty Officer Allen Schindler repeatedly complained to his commanding officer on the USS Belleau Wood of harassment and blatant threats such as, “There’s a faggot on this ship and he should die.” He got no help. In fact, a disciplinary hearing related to his having revealed his gayness that he’d requested be held privately was left open and 2-300 people attended.
In October 1992….before Clinton was elected….Schindler was attacked by another sailor in Nagasaki. When the shore patrol arrived, “he was unconscious but still alive, gargling up blood. His face was so disfigured no one was sure of his race, much less his name. Patrolman Anthony Aptimes got a pulse, then lost it. He wiped the blood out of the sailor’s mouth with a T-shirt and pressed on his chest, trying to restart his heart. With each compression, blood trickled from the sailor’s mouth and bubbled out of a gash on the bridge of his nose. To Seaman Witte, the eyewitness who’d sounded the alarm, it looked as if the sailor’s nose had been shaved clean off his face. Witte cradled the man’s head and stared at the tattoos on his arms.
…The patient lying in the branch medical clinic that night had suffered at least four fatal injuries to the head, chest, and abdomen. He had eight broken ribs, fractures in the back of his skull and in the bones around his eyes; his nose was broken; his upper jaw was broken; the whole middle portion of his face was detached and floating loosely. There were bruises and cuts on the surface of his neck, head, and chest; there were bruises on his brain, on his lungs, his heart. The pericardial sac around his heart was filled with 250 milliliters of blood, enough to top off a juice glass. His liver had been turned to pulp “like a tomato smushed up inside its cover.” The impact of blows to the chest had torn his aorta; his bladder had been ripped open; his penis had been bruised and lacerated. There were sneaker-tread marks stamped on his forehead and chest. The pattern of his T-shirt had been impressed on his skin. Seven months later Commander Edward Kilbane, the forensic pathologist at Okinawa who had performed more than one thousand autopsies, would testify that he had never seen a more severe beating. The sailor’s injuries were worse than the damage to a person who’d been stomped by a horse; they were similar to what might be sustained in a high-speed car crash or a low-speed aircraft accident.”
It was only by the tattoos on his arm that his mother was able to identify his body.
WHO is so shameless that he would troll from one Website to another exploiting the murders of gays for his own NONGAY repeat NONGAY-related political agenda?
See above.
[img]http://nicolen.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/phelps2.jpg[/img]
Bill
what part of it’s wrong to be gay don’t you get?
Bill Perdue
Clintons DADT codified the existing bigotry in the military and led to harassment, violence, unequal treatment, discriminatory and every once in a while, murder. That is totally and entirely the fault of Bill Clinton and his massive bipartisan majority of Democrats and Republicans who passed DADT and to Bush and Obama and their Congressional parties that refuse to repeal it.
Clintons DOMA codified bigotry around SSM and likewise passed Congress with huge bipartisan majorities. Clinton championed DOMA so he could trawl for bigot votes. He signed it immediately signed so that he could trawl for bigot votes, hoping they’d make up for the losses he incurred supporting NAFTA and betraying unions. And so he could run ads on redneck christer radio stations boasting that he’d signed DOMA.
The Clintons, in spite of their promises enacted and supported viciously bigoted laws and anti-labor laws like DOMA, DADT, and NAFTA. Bill Clintons embargo of medicine, food and sanitary supplies murdered about half a million Iraqi children. Bill Clinton championed the deregulation of banks and finances that caused today’s economic failure. Michael Bedwell/Leland Francis enable bigotry to say nothing of war against children, NAFTA, deregulation and union busting.
(Leland Francis/Michael Bedwell is unwelcome in a lot of places because he froths too much. He literally spits acid and dripping venom shilling for Bill and Hill. Even exceptionally sharp political disagreements can be expressed politically and with a minimum of personal invective.
However I have to say that the question of whether or not Bill and Hillary Clinton, Obama and Biden are bigots falls more into the ‘duh’ category than something to argue about.)
Steve
From the time of the civil war, until at least the 1960’s, police in most of the south never saw a white sheet. They never saw any evidence of any crime against any black person. There could be a cross still burning in the front yard when they arrived at the murder scene, and they would not see it. The problem was not that they physically could not see it. The problem was that they chose not see clear and obvious evidence.
To this day, the police in much of the country still choose not to see evidence of any crime against any gay person. In cases of murder, it is difficult to avoid the fact that there is a body. But almost all other evidence can be either found or ignored, according to the diligence and will of the investigator.
All we can do here is to ask the questions. The actual investigators must decide to do what is right. It could be that there really is no evidence to be found. Or, perhaps, a careful look by a second investigator will embarrass the first one.
SM
There is a Hate Crimes Legislation that has passed the House and is waiting for the Senate.
Call Reid and your Senators out on this.
Steve
I don’t know what the political implications of this killing are, nor how the gay or straight community feels about it and frankly I don’t care. What I am concerned about is this. I grew up with August or B.J as I knew him,I’d known the guy over twenty years. Regardless of where he stood on the fence or what the military’s policy is on homosexuality, my friend is dead, his family has to live with that and he is no longer with us. It bothers me when we politicize everything in this country and forget about the one thing that makes us all the same, we are humans. No one deserves to die the way August did, rest in peace brother.
Helga von ornstein
@Dabq: Maybe your not aware of this but here in america no one is forced to read articles they do not particularly like.
mikeandrewsdantescove
Once again it appears the military is covering up the facts.
Mike
http://www.prideshowcase.com/awards.htm
Obama's Brain On Crack
It wasn’t a hate crime, because they didn’t hate the solider, they just hated his behavior. Ergo, hence, therefore and thus, no hate crime.
alan brickman
MAJOR, MAJOR LAWSUIT!!
marcus
To plan and kill a man whether he is gay, straight, black, white or whatever is evil and disgusting. I suppose I am very fortunate to have been raised in an environment where the only homophobia I have ever experienced is from stupidly little kids who shouted some crap when I was holding my friend’s hand in public. however, the point I’m trying to say is that whatever motivates one man to maliciously kill another is fucking wrong no matter what the underlying reason, whether because of race, sexuality, money, drugs etc. its no more or less unacceptable and makes this poor man’s death no more or less tragic and hence should not affect the degree of punishment that these beasts receive ALL CRIME IS HATEFUL – SO ‘HATE CRIME’ IS A DUMBASS PHRASE THAT ENCOURAGES SOCIAL DIVISION AND INJUSTICE