Unfinished Lives

Woman Stabbed In Eye by Homophobe

Buffalo, NY – Amidst a spate of recent anti-LGBT assaults in the Buffalo area, a 29-year-old lesbian was stabbed in the face and the eye by a woman shouting anti-gay slurs.  Lindsay C. Harmon was leaving a club on New Year’s about 2 a.m. when a woman assailed her and her friends with anti-gay slurs, and stabbed her in the right eye.  No one has been arrested for the crime.  While local law enforcement has not designated the case as a hate crime assault, Harmon has no doubt as to the reason she was targeted.  She is gay.  The Buffalo News reports that Harmon had never feared for herself or her friends until the attack, which authorities are calling “unusually severe.”  Harmon and her friends were leaving a New Year’s celebration at Roxy’s, a popular downtown nightclub, when a group of men and two women began shouting at them.  The exchange of words let to a confrontation.  Harmon related to SheWired.com, “I just remember saying, “What did you say?’ It’s just crazy to me. I’d never think anyone would say that in the main gay area of Buffalo. I’ve been going to Roxy’s for like 10 years.”  Then Harmon says she tried to break up the argument when a young woman in her late teens or early 20s stabbed her in the eye.  “Let’s go home,” I said. “Let’s get out of here,” Harmon recalled.  “I was walking away, and she [the attacker] came behind me, and I got nailed. I thought I’d been punched, and I fell. I just sat there waiting for her to kick me or something.”  Her friends started to go after the assailant, but hesitated when one of them shouted warned that the attacker had a knife.  At that moment, Harmon began crying out that she was blind in her right eye.  Police are searching for two women who fled the scene after Harmon was stabbed.  Following three hours of surgery, she has only recovered the ability to see shadows with her injured eye.  No one knows whether she will ever be able to see normally with it again.   According to Jay Tokasz of the Buffalo News, Harmon has stitches in her eyelid, cheek and arm and has to take three kinds of eye-drop medications every two hours. “I sleep as much as I possibly can,” she said in a phone interview, “because my eye gets really sore.”  The story of the brutal assault on an innocent lesbian has resonated far beyond the Buffalo metro area.  As of this writing, more than 17,000 Facebook members have joined a support group for Harmon online. A former resident of Buffalo, an anonymous insurance broker, was so deeply touched by Harmon’s plight that he put up a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the attacker.  Harmon says she intends to write in response to every comment on her Facebook page.  “I never thought it would get this big out into the world,” she said.

January 12, 2010 - Posted by unfinishedlives | Anglo Americans, Anti-LGBT hate crime, harassment, Heterosexism and homophobia, Law and Order, Lesbian women, New York, Perpetrators of Hate Crime, Slurs and epithets, stabbings, Unsolved LGBT Crimes, women | Anglo Americans, Anti-LGBT hate crime, harassment, Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and homophobia, Law and Order, Lesbians, New York, perpetrators, stabbings, Unsolved anti-LGBT crimes