A murder at a bus stop changes Newark
She told a man she was a lesbian and was killed for it. The Sakia Gunn case changed Newark.
On 11 May 2003, fifteen-year-old Sakia Gunn was murdered in Newark, New Jersey. The schoolgirl, who identified as a lesbian, had spent the evening with friends in Greenwich Village in New York. Many queer young people from Newark went there at weekends to escape harassment in their everyday lives. On the way home, the young women were accosted by two men at a bus stop in the city centre. They said they were lesbians so that the men would leave them alone. Twenty-nine-year-old Richard McCullough then became violent and stabbed Sakia in the chest with a knife. She died shortly afterwards in the arms of her cousin Valencia, who was also her best friend.
The case is regarded as one of the first bias murder cases under New Jersey's hate crime law. According to one activist, up to 2,000 people came together at protests, and around 2,500 are said to have attended the funeral. The media, by contrast, hardly paid attention, even though a young Black lesbian had been killed: one study counted only 21 articles about Sakia's murder in major US newspapers, compared with 659 for the Matthew Shepard case in 1998. In 2005, McCullough reached a deal with prosecutors. The bias murder charge was dropped; he pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter, among other things, and received 20 years in prison. A federal hate crime law that also covers sexual orientation only came in 2009.
Grief turned into a movement. Activists founded the Newark Pride Alliance, and in 2013 the city's first gay and lesbian community centre opened. In 2023, a stretch of street was named Sakia Gunn Way. And in 2024, her name was added to the Wall of Honor at the Stonewall Inn in New York.