Victims Become Heroes St Testify
Robert, a 27-year old gay man, left the bar
on Front Street in Wilmington on the night of
July 19. There were several girls sitting on his
car, and a couple of men leaning against the
outside wall of the tavern. He got in his car and
drove to a stop sign. One of the men who had
been in front of the tavern waved, and
approached the car.
The man said he had been drinking and
“would appreciate it” if someone would follow
him home. “He said he lived in Leland and we
could party when we got to his house,” Robert
recently testified.
“We went toward Leland,” he told
Brunswich County Superior Court earlier this
month, “then he turned down a one-lane
road,” near an abandoned packing house. “1
started getting a bad feeling, so 1 wrote down
his license number and put it in the glove
compartment.
“I finally found a place to pull in and turn
around. About that time I saw headlights
coming toward me and I was blocked in.” A
second car had been following him with its
headlights out.
In this second car, were Donald Herring, 23,
and Joseph Meyer, 27. The man in the first
car, Mark Watts, who had asked Robert to
follow him, is one of six defendants charged in
this and a similar incident. (Jonathan Darrell
Wooten, 24, Timothy Efird, and David
Stowell are the others).
Once he was blocked in, Robert said,
“That’s when Herring got out of his car,
pointed a gun through the windshield at my
face and said ‘Faggot, you have just taken
your last ride.’ I just floored it. The bullet
shattered the back side window. It must have
missed my head by inches.”
His car crashed into an embankment and
stopped. “Someone unlocked the door
through the broken window,” he said, and
took the keys to the car. “They pulled me out,
hit me in the face, kicked me down the
embankment.”
He said he was beaten and kicked several
times, but wasn’t sure which of the men were
kicking him. “I kept crawling,” he told the
court. “All I knew was there were a bunch of
people behind me wanting to kill me.”
He scrambled through the woods until he
found a tree with thick vines growing around
it, then climbed until he was hidden by foliage.
“I could hear them all around me, looking for
me, for about 10 minutes,” he said. “This was
about 2 a.m. 1 stayed in the tree until the sun
came up.”
Meanwhile, his car was ransacked, and
several items stolen. He told the court that, in
addition to his car keys, a wallet with $75, a
timing light, spare tire, half bag of marijuana
and fender skirts were stolen from his car.
When morning came, Robert reached a
phone in New Hanover County and called
Brunswick and New Hanover police. He was
told to meet a Brunswick County deputy at
Parker’s (a restaurant) in Leland at 10am.
Robert, at 6 feet 2 inches and 165 pounds,
told the Wilmington Star he was never afraid
to talk to strangers before the assault. He is
more cautious now. “I guess I learned you just
can’t trust everybody,” he explained to Star
staff writer Deborah Kelly. “I believed this
guy. Men aren’t taught to be fearful. Some
people are out just to be mean. 1 guess they get
off on it. I know now.”
“You just can’t let people do that”
Robert, who asked to be identified only by
his first name, was one of two Wilmington gay
men who recently testified in court that they
were beaten up for sport. They both told the
Star that their court appearance was difficult,
but they would go through it again to spare
others the same fate.
“At first, when I thought about the things it
would bring out, I was leery of it,” Robert
said. “Some of my friends said I should just
forget about it. But there was no question in
my mind they had to be prosecuted, because it
could happen again and again. You just can’t
let people do that.”
The second victim, a 23-year-old man who
was assaulted August 29, agreed: “It was the
thought that these fellows had done this to me
and to someone else. How many more times
would they do it? How many others had they
already done it to? 1 didn’t want it to happen to
any of my friends.”
One separate occasions last summer, each
of the two men was lured to a remote area of
Brunswick County by a single man, then
trapped by three to four others on lonely, one
lane roads, where they were beaten, shot at,
kicked and robbed.
Second Victim Hospitalized
The second victim testified that he was
sitting on the balcony at St. John’s Art Gallery
in Wilmington around lam when four men
drove by in two separate cars, who he
identified as Meyer, Herring, Wooten and
Efird.
He said he walked to his home, about four
blocks from the art gallery, got his car and
went down to Chandler’s Wharf, where he was
sitting on the hood of his car when Herring
and Meyer pulled up in a red Camaro. Meyer
invited him to go to a party in Southport, he
testified.
As with Robert before, the second victim
followed them in his car and several miles
down Highway 133, they turned onto a dirt
logging road, stopped and blocked the road. A
second car came up from behind and blocked
any exit, he said.
Meyer came up to his blocked car, he told
the court, and said, “You’ve had your last
ride.” He said Herring pointed a gun at him
and told him to get out of the car.
He reached for his pistol on the floorboard
of the car, he told the court, when Herring shot
into his car shattering the rear window. He
then rolled his side window down and threw
his pistol out in hopes that “they wouldn’t
shoot at me any more.”
He said he started to get out of the car when
he was struck on the head. He said several men
struck him and shoved him into a ditch, and as
he was falling he felt one of them take his
wallet and a gold chain he was wearing around
his neck. Meyer apparently went into the ditch
after him, and continued beating him until he
lost consciousness.
When he came to, he testified that his
checkbook, a gold diamond ring and a
backpack were also taken, in addition to all his
keys except the ignition key. No one was
around and three tires were slashed, he said.
HHniHHHl
He made his way to Highway 133, where he
hitched a ride to New Hanover Memorial
Hosptial, where he was admitted and
hospitalized for three days after the attack,
suffering a concussion, a fractured facial bone,
a bruised kidney and abrasions.
District Attorney Michael F. Easley said the
attackers thought they would get away with
their crimes because the victims would be
embarrassed to testify. “Good criminals know
how to pick their prey. They will pick old
people, women who are scared to testify after
they are raped.”
Alex Hall, attorney for the accused Herring,
asked the jury to consider how the second
victim got to the scene of the crime, “with his
tight blue jeans and his earring in his ear and
his leather vest.”
“How many of you cruise the
neighborhoods at 2 in the morning?” Hall
asked in his closing arguments.
Robert commented to the Star: “If this had
happened to an old lady, would Hall have
defended them the same way? It just never
made any sense to me. I don’t think the fact
that someone is a homosexual has anything to
do with it.”
The second victim agreed. “This issue was
not ‘Are you gay?’ but ‘Did these people beat
you up and rob you?* ” he said.
In his closing arguments, District Attorney
Easley compared the defendants to a “pack of
wolves .” and said that their actions were the
result of “depraved minds. . . the same type
of mind that rapists have, that bigots have.”
Superior Court Judge Thomas Watts called
both men “extremely dangerous.” '
Contrary to his fears, Robert said, testifying
“wasn’t nearly as bad as what anyone would
think it would be. I was afraid that everyone
would have the attitude that Alex Hall had —
that I asked for it, that 1 deserved it. Hall was
trying to justify the wrong that his client did
because we were homosexual. As though it
were okay for them to harm us in any way they
wanted.”
Herring and Meyer, were convicted of the
attacks in Brunswick County Superior Court
in April and sentenced to 23 and 25 years,
respectively. Wooten, pleaded guilty to
conspiracy and robbery and is awaiting
sentencing.(In exchange for his lesser
sentence, Wooten agreed to testify against the
other men.) The three others — Watts,
Stowell, and Efird — are scheduled to be tried
the week of May 21. •
MW—1i—ii
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