The Brandon McInerney Hate Crime Trial
At age 14 Brandon McInerney fatally shot Larry King, age 15 and a fellow student at his high school. The victim was a gay cross dresser who wore high-heeled boots, makeup and jewelry to school, and had made a series of public sexual advances toward McInerney. McInerney, who is not gay and had a girlfriend, took offense at King’s continuing sexual harassment.
According to the defense attorney, the killing was motivated by McInerney’s “inability to deal with the humiliation of having an openly gay boy flirt with him at school,” which seems reasonable enough. But the prosecution claims that the murder was a hate crime, solely on the basis that McInerney had associations with the “white supremacist movement.”
Investigators say the teenager on trial for the classroom shooting death of a gay student embraced the white supremacist movement. Doodles of swastikas, white power images and books about Adolf Hitler’s SS and an Iron Cross were introduced during Wednesday’s testimony in 17-year-old Brandon McInerney’s trial for the death of 15-year-old Larry King. McInerney is being tried as an adult for murder and hate crime allegations. (Sacramento Bee, July 14, 2011)
Indeed, McInerney had the temerity to avoid “a school field trip to the Museum of Tolerance, the educational arm of the human rights organization the Simon Wiesenthal Center”—obviously marking him as a bad guy. Read more