How Sakia Gunn Was Killed
On the night of the attack, May 11, 2003, Gunn and four friends had traveled from Newark, N.J. to Manhattan. Like many LGBTQ+ teenagers from Newark at the time, they often spent weekends in Greenwich Village, home to the Stonewall Inn and a longstanding center of queer life. Gunn’s friends later described the trips as an escape from harassment they frequently experienced closer to home.
After returning to Newark, the girls were approached by two men near the bus stop. Witnesses told investigators that the men approached the group, but when the girls said they were gay, McCullough became angry, authorities said. According to authorities, McCullough punched one of the girls before stabbing Gunn once in the chest.
Newark police arrested McCullough several days later. The other man who had been with him that night was also arrested, but prosecutors later dropped the charges against him, saying the investigation showed that he had not participated in the attack.
A Plea Bargain for a Lesser Crime
Prosecutors charged McCullough with bias murder and related crimes. The bias murder charge was especially significant to LGBTQ+ advocates, who saw the case as a test of whether the legal system would fully recognize anti-gay violence directed at a young Black lesbian.
But hate crimes can be difficult to prove, and prosecutors often hesitate to bring them to trial, Jeannine Bell, a law and social justice professor who studies hate crimes at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
“Evidence of bias can be awkward, and may land poorly with juries,” she explains. “For instance, if you use racist jokes as evidence [of racism], jury members might have told racist jokes.”
Instead of losing a conviction, prosecutors often drop bias or hate crime charges “in exchange for a plea,” Bell says, adding that murder cases in particular are “easy” to resolve with a plea.
In 2005, McCullough struck a deal with prosecutors that led to the bias murder charge being dropped. Instead, he pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter, aggravated assault and bias intimidation.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors said the plea agreement guaranteed substantial prison time without forcing Gunn’s family to sit through a lengthy trial.
Sakia Gunn’s Lasting Impact
Even with the bias intimidation plea, many LGBTQ+ advocates remained frustrated by the handling of Gunn’s case. They also were disappointed by how little national coverage Gunn’s death received compared with other anti-gay killings of the time, particularly the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. One researcher who compared the media coverage of the two slayings found 659 articles in major newspapers about Shepard's murder, but just 21 articles about Gunn's murder in the seven months after the killing.
Even so, Gunn’s murder had a lasting impact: Newark residents and activists have said Gunn’s death fundamentally changed conversations about visibility and safety for queer youth in the city. In the months and years after she was killed, the community advocated for Newark’s first gay and lesbian community center, which opened in 2013, and fought for increased patrolling in the area where she was murdered. Activists also founded The Newark Pride Alliance, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, after her death. And in New York City, the Stonewall Inn added Gunn’s name to its Wall of Honor in 2024.
Bell says she sees “absolutely no evidence of prosecutors being more likely” to bring hate crimes to trial since Gunn’s death. But in 2009, The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, was signed into federal law.
“Not having a federal hate crime law in place in 2003, there was no federal process, funding or resources for law enforcement to apply, and there was insufficient motivation to call for justice at that time,” Sanchez says. If Gunn had been killed after it passed, he states, the law would have given federal prosecutors an avenue to pursue hate-crime charges against McCullough.
At the same time, both Sanchez and Bell caution that there is still a long way to go in terms of eliminating crimes against the LGBTQ+ community.
“There are still murders across communities for which accountability falters, and for the LGBTQ+ community, we have to fight so hard for the protections we are granted that we cannot afford for any of those to slip,” Sanchez says. “When violence in communities goes unchecked, it is bound to continue or grow. That is why the urgency of resolution—and recognition of these issues—weighs so strongly with our community, even if that energy is not matched by those who uphold laws.”
Bell adds that while murders of LGBTQ+ people sometimes get attention, “what is more concerning are the many, many attacks that are not murders—where victims are traumatized for the rest of their life, because they've been attacked because of something about themselves that they cannot change—that no one pays any attention to, that don’t show up in statistics because they are never reported to the police, and that receive no attention at all.”
