O’Shae Sibley was dancing to Beyoncé music at a Brooklyn gas station before he was fatally stabbed in an apparent anti-LGBTQ attack, the New York Times reports.
On Saturday (July 29) night, Sibley, a professional dancer and choreographer who is gay, and his friends were putting gas in a car and blasting Beyoncé’s Rennaissance. A group of men approached them at the gas station, yelling slurs and demanding they stop dancing.
Sibley and Otis Pena, one of Sibley’s friends, told the men: “Stop saying that. There is nothing wrong with being gay.” An argument between Sibley and the group escalated before one of the men stabbed him, police said.
Pena said he pressed on Sibley’s stabbing wound in an attempt to stop the bleeding before the dancer was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
“They murdered him because he’s gay, because he stood up for his friends,” Pena said in a Facebook video following the killing. “His name was O’Shae and you all killed him. You all murdered him right in front of me.”
Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a gay state senator in New York, spoke out against Sibley’s killing, saying he was “heartbroken and enraged.”
“Gay joy is not crime,” Hoylman-Sigal wrote on Twitter. “Hate-fueled attacks are.”
Sibley moved from Philadelphia to New York just before the pandemic in hopes that the city would provide more dance opportunities, according to his aunt, Tondra Sibley.
“It was a senseless crime,” she said. “O’Shae has always been a peacemaker. All he wanted to do was dance.”
As of Monday (July 31), no arrests have been made in Sibley’s killing. Police said the hate crimes unit was involved in the investigation.
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