Unfinished Lives

Justice for Jimmy Lee Dean: Both Attackers Now Sentenced

Jimmy Lee Dean, Victim of Brutal Attack

Dallas, TX – The second man who nearly beat Jimmy Lee Dean to death in July 2008 has been sentenced to 75 years in prison.  Bobby Jack Singleton, 30, faced his fate August 27 in Dallas County’s 194th District Court.  The co-defendant in the case, Jonathan Russell Gunter, 33, received a 30-year sentence for the crime in March of this year.  The Singleton sentence means that the jury understood the severity of the crime against Mr. Dean, who has been permanently disfigured and lost his entire sense of smell due to the attack.  The earliest Singleton can be paroled is 37 1/2 years under Texas law.  There is no penalty attached to an LGBT hate crime in Texas, though the Dallas Police who investigated the attack, which occurred just a block off the major LGBT entertainment strip in the city, treated the crime as anti-gay from the beginning.  Had the Matthew Shepard Act been law at the time of the case, there would have been another recourse for law enforcement to take.  Dean said that he was satisfied by the sentence.  Testimony in the trial revealed that the co-defendants had drunk five pitchers of beer at a North Dallas bar before getting up the courage to travel to the Oaklawn/Cedar Springs area to rob gay people because the perpetrators were “low on cash” and believed gay men could be more easily robbed.  Gunter took a gun with him and brandished it at Dean, a 17-year resident of the Oaklawn neighborhood, on a darkened section of Dickason Street.  Singleton, however, did most of the severe damage to Dean as he lay unconscious on the sidewalk,

Gunter (l), Singleton (r)

kneeing him, kicking him, and stomping on his face with his boots while yelling anti-gay slurs at his helpless victim.  The jury heard taped phone conversations between Singleton and his half-sister while he was in jail awaiting trial, in which he laughed about Dean’s nose hanging on by a flap of skin, and claimed that he was going to pretend he was gay so that the punishment might be lighter on him.  “All I got to do is fill out one of them homosexual cards and prove that I’m a faggot, too,” he said.  He went on to his half-sister that if he were sentenced to prison, he could just tell the corrections officers that he was “not really a fucking faggot” so that he could skip being housed in protective custody.  Dean said to Dallas Voice reporter John Wright, “This [sentence] sets a precedent for anything like this that happens.  He also said that no one should be a target of violence for any reason, including one’s sexual orientation.  What now remains to be done is support for Mr. Dean in the months and years that follow this trial.  LGBT presence at both the Gunter trial and the Singleton trial was sparse.  Dean and his longtime roommate, Thomas Bergh, are contemplating moving to Oklahoma, away from the scene of the attack.  Dean told reporters that when he walks along Dickason Street these days, he has to walk down the middle of the street, and not on the sidewalk where the two Garland, TX men nearly killed him.  Like so many victims before him, Dean will live with the nightmares and the physical consequences of the attack for the rest of his life.  It is not enough for the LGBT community to shrug shoulders now that that last trial has been held, and assume Dean can just go from this point vindicated.  Dallas has to face its hate-crime problems, as the Dean case, and the Richard Hernandez  case have both shown in recent months.  One way to do that is to get support for Jimmy Lee right from here on out.

August 28, 2009 - Posted by unfinishedlives | Anglo Americans, Beatings and battery, gay men, Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and homophobia, Law and Order, Legislation, Matthew Shepard Act, Perpetrators of Hate Crime, Slurs and epithets, Stomping and Kicking Violence, Texas | Anglo Americans, anti-LGBT hate crime murder, Beatings and battery, Bludgeoning, gay men, gun violence, Hate Crimes, Matthew Shepard Act, Stomping and Kicking Violence, Texas