Sakia Gunn: the 15-year-old Newark never forgot
A Black lesbian teenager was stabbed to death at a Newark bus stop in 2003. The country barely noticed.
Sakia Gunn was 15. On the early morning of May 11, 2003, she and four friends stood at the corner of Broad and Market streets in downtown Newark, New Jersey, waiting for a ride home after a night out in New York's Greenwich Village.
Two men in a car pulled up and propositioned them. The girls said they were lesbians and weren't interested. The men got out. A fight broke out, and Richard McCullough stabbed Gunn in the chest. She died at University Hospital.
McCullough was then in his late twenties. Prosecutors charged him, and on March 3, 2005, they cut a deal: the murder count was dropped, and he pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter, aggravated assault, and bias intimidation. That last count put the anti-gay motive into the official record. A judge sentenced him to 20 years on April 21, 2005. He walked free in May 2020.
The shape of Gunn's killing mirrors a case the whole country knew by heart. Matthew Shepard, a white gay college student, was beaten and left to die in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. His name became a movement, then a federal law.
Gunn's name went nowhere near as far. Researchers who tallied the coverage found the gap in cold numbers. Roughly 659 stories ran in major newspapers about Shepard's murder. About 21 ran about Gunn's in the seven months after she died.
The crimes were not different in kind. Both were bias killings of young people who said they were attacked for being gay. The difference was who got killed. Gunn was Black, poor, female, and a teenager from Newark. Shepard was a white university student whose case arrived with a ready-made narrative.
Newark, though, held on to her. Hundreds packed her funeral. Local organizers turned her death into a demand for services for LGBTQ+ youth in the city, kids who often had nowhere safe to go. The Newark LGBTQ Center traces part of its origins to that organizing. Two decades later, the city renamed a downtown street in her honor.
The bias-intimidation conviction stands as a legal marker. New Jersey, unlike Wyoming in 1998, had a hate-crime law on the books, and prosecutors actually used it. What the case never got was the national reckoning handed to a comparable killing five years before. How differently the country responded is not a footnote to her story. It is her story.