A group of 15 young people, mostly students of Howard and George Washington universities, honored the memory of Matthew Shepard with a candlelight vigil Monday night in front of the ABC News studio in D.C.
Shepard was a gay man who was murdered in rural Laramie, Wyo., at the age of 22 in 1998. The vigil was organized in response to a segment on ABC's "20/20" that aired last Friday in which reporter Elizabeth Vargas questioned whether Shepard's murder was a hate crime or the result of a conflict involving drugs and money.
Former police Detective Ben Fritzen, a lead investigator in the case, said: "What it came down to really is drugs and money and two punks that were out looking for it."
The report has drawn fire from gay rights groups and Shepard's family, who argue that the information Vargas presents is not new and that the report was slanted to conform to an incomplete theory.
The students want Vargas to apologize to the public and the gay community.
"It's a disgrace what they did to the memory of Matthew Shepard," said Graham Murphy, a GW graduate and the founder of the Student Equal Rights Campaign.
"People think that the murder of Matthew Shepard is some fable that we use to further our agenda," he said. "Unfortunately he was not the only victim of an anti-gay hate crime. There have been many this year that were not reported by the mainstream media."
Vice President of AU's Queers and Allies Macaulay Thomas said she had not seen the "20/20" episode, but is knowledgeable about the Shepard case and is upset Vargas questioned the murder's hate crime status.
"I think it's a very good symbol of how ABC was minimizing Mathew Shepard's death," she said.
Murphy didn't know the exact number of lesbian, gay and transgender people who have been victims of hate crimes, but he said he knew of 21 transgender people who were victims of hate crimes in 2004.
A Human Rights Campaign press release said 1,430 hate crimes based on sexual orientation were reported in 2003, including six murders. It is the highest amount of murders out of all the hate crime categories, followed closely by four murders based on race bias.
In October 2003, ABC reported that many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are killed every year, but none have received the media attention Shepard has.
Standing outside the building, the group shared observations and information about the "20/20" segment and the history of the Shepard case. Murphy read a statement released by Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, which states that "20/20" edited down the interview she gave to Vargas and took her sentences out of context to make them fit in with Vargas' segment.
Shepard's statement also says that the interviews of the two police officers in charge of investigating Matthew's murder were edited down to make them seem to support Vargas' analysis, and the interview with her legal counsel was omitted entirely. Judy Shepard says these sources agree that her son's murderers were motivated by homophobia.
CNN also ran an Associated Press report on the ABC interviews with Shepard's murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, in which they say they were motivated by drugs and money, not homophobia.
