This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated August 18, 2023
August 23 will mark 34 years since the murder of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst. Hawkins, a black boy from East New York, had taken the N train to Bensonhurst with a few friends to look at a used car they had seen a classified ad for. After dozens of local teens had shouted racial slurs at them and chased them with weapons, one of them fatally shot Hawkins in the chest twice.
I was a kid at the time and the murder scene was close to my home. Not all that far from my current home, where my wife and I are raising our two boys, a black man, O’Shae Sibley, was killed at a Midwood gas station on July 29. Police have stated that before being fatally stabbed, Sibley was subjected to racist and homophobic slurs.
Two hate crimes, a mile-and-a-half apart and 34 years apart, where African American males were killed because they were black. In Sibley’s case, it was also because he was gay.
Sibley and his friends were filling up their car at a gas station at the intersection of Ave P and Coney Island Avenue. They were having fun, voguing to a Beyonce song when a group of young men began hurling homophobic and racist slurs at them. A witness account stated that a member of the group said, “we’re Muslim, I don’t want you dancing.” Sibley tried to deescalate the situation but, moments later, he lay dying with a stab wound to his torso.
On Friday, August 4, a memorial was organized at the gas station where he was killed. I went to the event and was struck by the scene. About a thousand people were crowded in and around the gas station, spilling out across Avenue P. People mourned, called for justice, and some remembered O’Shae in the way he was most happy in his life: dancing.
Everyone was there in solidarity, and it was clear that even those unaware of the planned memorial, were curious about the event to remember someone who was murdered in their conservative neighborhood. I could not help but think back to the aftermath of the Yusuf Hawkins murder 34 years ago in my neighborhood and how different it was.
In organized events that followed in 1989, black protesters were taunted with watermelons. In the documentary ‘Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn’ which premiered on HBO in 2020, news footage from the period shows a Bensonhurst resident at one of these protests proudly exclaiming, “This is not a racist community. We just don’t like black people, that’s all.”
Following Sibley’s murder, some tried to stoke animosity between the LGBTQIA+ and Muslim communities, given that being offended as a Muslim by Sibley’s out and proud attitude was reported to be at the heart of why he was attacked. The day after the memorial, Mayor Adams held a press conference at the gas station, joined by members of the LGBTQIA+ and Muslim communities — both of which have often been victimized by targeted, hateful violence — who came together in unity to remember O’shae, call for justice, and dispel the rhetoric that some use to try to divide them.
A comment on a tweet I made about the press conference, in which someone said, “Attackers were muslim [sic]. Muslims hate gay people” was one of many aimed at maligning all Muslims. We’ve seen too many murderers use religion to justify their crimes, but no religion’s adherents bear responsibility for one of their fellow followers who commits murder. The 1.8 billion Muslims in the world or the 2.6 billion Christians or anyone else is not guilty of their offenses.
The reality is Sibley’s murderer is not even Muslim. His lawyer told reporters that he is “a good Christian boy.” 17-year-old Dmitry Popov was arrested and charged with murder as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon.
Yusuf Hawkins was murdered in 1989 by an 18-year-old. For all the similarities in these two hate crimes, the difference in what followed has been stark. Nobody was harassing those who came out to the memorial for Sibley at the scene of his murder, as was the case following Yusuf Hawkins death. Nobody is proudly telling a news reporter that they are not racist; they just don’t like black people, as was the case in Bensonhurst in 1989.
The community I grew up in has changed for the better. O’Shae Sibley should still be here. Someone being murdered in Brooklyn, again, simply because of who they are, leaves me with the same terrible feeling I had as a kid more than three decades ago. Seeing how people react in solidarity to this terrible act gives me a hope that I did have back then.
