Catfish
09-21-2007, 10:03 PM
On Sun, 27 Jul 2003 19:14:25 -0400, "rfgdxm/Robert F. Golaszewski"
<rfgdxm@mochamail.com> wrote:
> Found another case of someone who committed murder while on LSD.
>This brutal slaying also involved alcohol.
dude this is like way worse than having a foot fetish as far as i'm
concerned...lsd killings. creepy.
>
>
>http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF2001/Bull/Bull.html
>
>Anatomy Of A Gay Murder
>Chris Bull
>
>
>Jon Christopher Buice doesn't look the part of a gay-bashing killer.
>Sitting behind a blue steel mesh in bleached white prison garb and
>T-shirt, the brown-eyed, baby-faced convict, even at 26, could pass
>still for the ordinary white suburban teenager he once was.
>
>Buice is serving the seventh year of a 45-year sentence for the July
>1991 slaying of Paul Broussard, who was himself 26 when he was
>bludgeoned and stabbed to death by Buice and nine of his friends on a
>Houston street. Even today, Buice seems unsure how he ended up behind
>bars, a ward of the Texas Department of Corrections in Huntsville, about
>an hour drive due north of the city where the murder occurred.
>
>"Everything is still a blur to me," he says in a voice so soft it is
>nearly lost in the din of iron bars opening and slamming. "I think about
>it every day, but I'm still not sure why everything happened the way it
>did. I'm not sure I'll ever know."
>
>Along the gruesome trail of antigay violence in America, the Broussard
>murder remains an unusual episode. Years before such crimes were deemed
>national news, this brutal attack led to significant changes in the
>Houston police department, including a sting operation aimed at nabbing
>young gay bashers in the act. It was so effective that several
>undercover officers posing as gay men were assaulted.
>
>The attack also galvanized the city's cautious gay community, which at
>the time was reeling from AIDS and the 1986 repeal of an ordinance meant
>to shield gays from discrimination. It changed forever the trajectories
>of the ten young men charged in the crime as well as the lives of
>Broussard's family and friends, transforming them from anguished
>supporters of their loved ones to determined gay rights activists.
>
>That fateful Fourth of July evening began like the usual weekend binge
>for Buice and his friends. After two days of drinking and partying, the
>ten young men-all but one attending Woodlands High, a largely
>middle-class school about half way between Houston and Huntsville-piled
>into three cars and headed into the big city. The band stopped first at
>an abandoned grain elevator, a popular teen hangout, where they painted
>graffiti and loafed in its cavernous confines.
>
>Already in an alcohol and LSD-induced haze, Buice could feel the tension
>building. He recalls his friends' penchant for climbing onto the old
>structure's rafters. "I remember thinking, 'Somebody's going to fall and
>get killed.'" According to Ray Hill, a Houston activist who traced
>events prior to the crime and led the gay community's response, Buice
>and his friends "spent a couple of hours running around like mice in a
>treadmill. Then they wanted more action."
>
>The quest for riskier thrills sent the teens careening toward trouble.
>Led by the oldest among them, 23-year-old Brian Spake, the men piled
>back into their cars and headed to Montrose, a heavily gay neighborhood,
>for a teen male ritual that was gaining in popularity among the suburban
>set: hassling, harassing and occasionally assaulting homosexual men.
>
>According to police, it was not the first time many of the youths, and
>others like them, had taken part. The Houston gay and lesbian community
>had complained about the abuse to the police department for years with
>no result. In fact, Montrose was considered a kind of nocturnal
>playground. Westheimer Street, a major artery bisecting Montrose, was
>generally clogged on weekend nights with teenagers cruising the streets
>in their cars. When they grew bored of sitting in traffic jams, they
>would park and head toward a thriving circle of gay bars, cafés and
>restaurants looking for targets to vent their frustration.
>
>Despite being under the legal drinking age of 18, Buice remembers
>hanging out in both gay and non-gay bars in the area. "I know it's
>probably hard to understand, but I didn't hate gay people," he says. "I
>had gay friends. I had gay relatives. I'd gone to gay bars with them. I'
>d go to straight bars. It didn't really make any difference to me. If a
>guy hit on me, I'd just say, 'Hey, man, that's not my thing.' Some of my
>best friendships started that way."
>
>Yet there is no getting around the anti-gay MO of Buice's behavior that
>night-or his role in the killing. As he and his friends drove around
>Montrose, they began homing in on gay men. Spotting someone they
>believed adhered to their stereotype of a homosexual, they
>shouted-delighting in the bad pun-"Where's Heaven?" a reference to a
>popular gay dance club in the heart of the neighborhood. If the person
>would point to the bar or give them directions-confirmation in their
>minds that he was gay-they shouted slurs and made threatening gestures.
>According to police, several men were accosted in the same manner that
>evening before the pack converged on Broussard.
>
>By that point, the young men had gotten away with their activity for
>several hours and, as Hill puts it, "They were smelling blood." Just
>after the 2 a.m. closing of a bar near Heaven, they came across
>Broussard and two of his young friends. They were walking toward home,
>just blocks away. With only a few years separating victims and
>perpetrators, in another circumstance, as Buice now acknowledges, the
>young men actually might have been friends. But for Buice and his
>collaborators, at least on this night, sexual orientation was the
>ultimate dividing line, the personification of "other." It was what drew
>them together across their own boundaries. Four of the young men
>involved in the incident were Latino; one was black; and the other six
>white. In the racially charged culture of Texas teenagers, homophobia
>gave them common cause.
>
>After an angry exchange of words, several of the boys began chasing
>Broussard and his friends. Broussard headed into a dead-end road while
>his friends escaped down a busier street. Soon he was surrounded. One of
>the boys-it is not clear who-wielded a two-by-four with nails protruding
>from the end. Broussard struggled mightily, landing blows on Buice and
>the others. But he was soon overcome with exhaustion and the pummeling
>of fists and puncture wounds. As he lay dying, blood poured onto the
>pavement from a chest wound Buice had inflicted with his Buck
>knife-evidence that eventually led to the long sentence received by many
>of the men involved in the killing. Paul Broussard died on a hospital
>bed a few hours later.
>
>Thousands of young men waste away in Texas prisons, sentenced for
>everything from drug possession to rape and murder. But rarely do these
>young perpetrators find themselves in the middle of a morality play
>about the very definition-and progressive redefinition-of right and
>wrong, good and evil. Rarely are they in a position to offer insight
>into the circumstances of a serious social problem.
>
>On one level, Buice is a singular character. In an April 1999 open
>letter addressed to the radio station KPFT, Buice wrote that to "the gay
>and lesbian community I owe a momentous apology. A repentance for an act
>of atrocity. The night of July 4, 1991, haunts me every day. It has hurt
>me deep inside. I was involved in taking a man's life. If it were
>possible, I would sacrifice my own life to bring Paul back. But this is
>not conceivable. And I aspire that you will hear the cries of who I am
>today.
>
>"As I've grown older," the letter continued, "I have gained a more
>relative understanding of what took place that night in Houston. It was
>never my intention to harm anyone. Never could I possibly imagine I
>would take a human life or take part in any action which would inflict
>fatal injuries. But the fact remains: I did participate and I have taken
>responsibility for this. Of course I knew I was wrong. In my youth I
>made poor decisions. After years here in prison, I see how disruptive my
>life and attitudes were."
>
>Buice says he wrote the letter after hearing about the murder of gay
>student Matthew Shepard, from the University of Wyoming. Through
>television coverage of that killing and others like it, Buice said in
>the letter that he learned of "some hateful actions taken against the
>minority of.a different sexual orientation. This wounds my heart and I'm
>appalled to know that I, too, was involved in this type of action."
>
>Yet as eloquent and sincere as the letter appears, Buice often seems at
>a loss to explain the crime and the motive behind it. He simply can't
>reconcile his professed lack of antipathy for gay men with his attack on
>one.
>
>It doesn't help that Buice claims he "blacked out" the night of the
>incident. He remembers someone shouting, "Where's Heaven?" at passersby.
>His next recollection is he is in the car driving home, his clothing
>stained with Broussard's blood. It wasn't until he heard about the
>murder the next day that it dawned on him what he had done. "I was
>drinking and tripping on LSD," he says. "I probably could have done
>anything that night and not completely realized it."
>
>As for the inducement for the crime, he says that at least in his case,
>it had less to do with Broussard's sexual orientation than with the fact
>that the boys were sure they could get away with it. They viewed
>Montrose, with its burgeoning gay community and thriving nightlife, as a
>sort of lawless enclave, freed of the enormous social strictures of
>their everyday life in school and in their suburban homes, where their
>every move seemed monitored by teachers and parents. The sex lives of
>gay men appeared exotic and forbidden. That held an unmistakable allure,
>even if some of the boys expressed a fierce loathing for it. They had
>heard on the streets that police didn't care about hassling gays, who
>they also believed were likely to carry more cash, have more fashionable
>clothing, and were extremely unlikely to report incidents to
>authorities.
>
>It was a combustible mix-alcohol, drugs, male bonding and the odd
>combination of fear and loathing the boys felt about homosexuality.
>"There was a thrill-seeking aspect to it," Buice says, borrowing a term
>from a researcher who had interviewed him about the crime just days
>earlier. "It was something we could do together and get away with it. It
>was really more about our relationships and our sense of boredom than
>about the victim. It could really have been anybody. It just happened to
>be Paul."
>
>Buice says that the crime was not premeditated. "I can say for sure that
>none of the guys were killers," he says. "We never once talked about
>getting anyone. In my wildest dreams I could never imagine that I'd come
>home with blood on my hands that night. It was just something that sort
>of happened. A lot of things went wrong all at once."
>
>There is no doubt Buice has an ulterior motive in expressing remorse. He
>is eligible for parole in 2003, though it is highly unlikely that he
>will receive it, even though by all accounts he is a model inmate. He is
>studying for a college degree, and would like to pursue graduate courses
>in psychology, in part to help him "come to terms with my past and to
>help others."
>
>But, there is also the distinct possibility that he is completely
>sincere. He clearly likes the idea of making restitution to those who
>have suffered from his crime. He agreed to this interview only after I
>mailed him a copy of an earlier article I'd written about another young
>man who was convicted of a similar crime. It was titled, "A Gay-Bashing
>Killer Turns His Life Around."
>
>Upon meeting me for the first time, he commented that he would like that
>headline to be his life story. In the open letter-one of the few ever
>penned by a confessed gay basher-Buice offered help the gay community.
>He can't explain what form that help would take, but he suggested that
>by telling his story he might prevent others from making "the same
>mistake I have."
>
>Buice has convinced at least one important critic. Hill, himself a
>former prison inmate who has befriended Buice in the years since the
>murder, declared that it was evident that Buice had seen the error of
>his ways, that he had been punished enough, and that he should be given
>serious consideration for parole. "The question is whether you see the
>criminal justice system as a means of retribution or rehabilitation,"
>Hill says. "If you look at it in terms of rehabilitation, there is
>little question that Jon is now ready to be a good citizen."
>
>The person who matters most in Buice's quest for early parole is having
>none of it. For nearly a decade, Nancy Rodriques has battled the demons
>that swirl around the murder of her son, Paul Broussard, her first of
>three children by two husbands. She asks herself whether she was
>accepting enough when Paul came out to her not long before his death.
>She regrets not being able to comfort him after the beating and
>stabbing, when he was talking incoherently at the hospital. Even today,
>she often wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
>
>Rodriques lives on the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, where she earns a
>living selling tires. She spends most of her time outside work tending
>to her two grown children, David and Michele, and her grandson, Jalen,
>4. She hopes to take Jalen to a lesbian minister at the local Unitarian
>Universalist Church for a lesson on homophobia. "I want Jalen to know
>that it's okay for some boys to love other boys, and for girls to love
>other girls. I want him to be completely free of the ugliness
>surrounding Paul."
>
>She has focused most of her still simmering anger on the ten boys and in
>combating their efforts to win early release. She has testified at
>parole hearings, lobbied state legislators, spoken at hate crimes
>rallies, and toured the prisons where her son's killers are locked up.
>Because the perpetrators were given sentences ranging from parole to
>seven years to 45, depending on their level of involvement in the actual
>assault, she has faced the possibility that one of her son's killers
>will be released nearly every year since they were incarcerated. In
>March, one such perpetrator was in fact released. "My goal in life is to
>live long enough to make sure that Buice serves his full term," says the
>fifty-six-year-old. "That would make me 87-I think I can make it."
>
>When it comes to gay bashers, she has reason to be suspicious about
>Texas justice. Just five years before Broussard's death, Dallas Judge
>Jack Hampton had gone easy on an eighteen-year-old who with a pal had
>shot to death two gay men on the grounds that "prostitutes and gays
>[are] at about the same level. I'd be hard put to give somebody life for
>killing a prostitute."
>
>In Texas at least, it seemed kids could simply claim that perpetrators
>had made a pass at them and then get away with murder. At every parole
>hearing for one of her son's perpetrators, she remains vigilant of even
>the most subtle suggestion that her son was somehow less than fully
>human. She believes he is deserving of the same protection and justice
>as everyone else.
>
>Between drags on a cigarette, Rodriques struggles to contain her sorrow
>and fury. "I have good days and bad days," she says. "Paul was my
>firstborn and we had a very intense attachment." On her desk in her
>modest home lies an envelope with the autopsy reports and photographs
>from the murder scene. Nine years after the murder, she still refuses to
>look at them. She has set up an elaborate system so that she never has
>to see them. When they are required as evidence in a parole hearing, she
>has a friend make copies and place them in another envelope so she can
>mail them. "I can face almost anything but that," she says. "It may
>sound silly, but that's where I draw the line.
>
>"I just couldn't bear to see what those boys did to Paul. As far as I'm
>concerned, there is no way they can ever pay enough of a price for what
>they have done to my boy."
>
>©2001 Chris Bull
>
<rfgdxm@mochamail.com> wrote:
> Found another case of someone who committed murder while on LSD.
>This brutal slaying also involved alcohol.
dude this is like way worse than having a foot fetish as far as i'm
concerned...lsd killings. creepy.
>
>
>http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF2001/Bull/Bull.html
>
>Anatomy Of A Gay Murder
>Chris Bull
>
>
>Jon Christopher Buice doesn't look the part of a gay-bashing killer.
>Sitting behind a blue steel mesh in bleached white prison garb and
>T-shirt, the brown-eyed, baby-faced convict, even at 26, could pass
>still for the ordinary white suburban teenager he once was.
>
>Buice is serving the seventh year of a 45-year sentence for the July
>1991 slaying of Paul Broussard, who was himself 26 when he was
>bludgeoned and stabbed to death by Buice and nine of his friends on a
>Houston street. Even today, Buice seems unsure how he ended up behind
>bars, a ward of the Texas Department of Corrections in Huntsville, about
>an hour drive due north of the city where the murder occurred.
>
>"Everything is still a blur to me," he says in a voice so soft it is
>nearly lost in the din of iron bars opening and slamming. "I think about
>it every day, but I'm still not sure why everything happened the way it
>did. I'm not sure I'll ever know."
>
>Along the gruesome trail of antigay violence in America, the Broussard
>murder remains an unusual episode. Years before such crimes were deemed
>national news, this brutal attack led to significant changes in the
>Houston police department, including a sting operation aimed at nabbing
>young gay bashers in the act. It was so effective that several
>undercover officers posing as gay men were assaulted.
>
>The attack also galvanized the city's cautious gay community, which at
>the time was reeling from AIDS and the 1986 repeal of an ordinance meant
>to shield gays from discrimination. It changed forever the trajectories
>of the ten young men charged in the crime as well as the lives of
>Broussard's family and friends, transforming them from anguished
>supporters of their loved ones to determined gay rights activists.
>
>That fateful Fourth of July evening began like the usual weekend binge
>for Buice and his friends. After two days of drinking and partying, the
>ten young men-all but one attending Woodlands High, a largely
>middle-class school about half way between Houston and Huntsville-piled
>into three cars and headed into the big city. The band stopped first at
>an abandoned grain elevator, a popular teen hangout, where they painted
>graffiti and loafed in its cavernous confines.
>
>Already in an alcohol and LSD-induced haze, Buice could feel the tension
>building. He recalls his friends' penchant for climbing onto the old
>structure's rafters. "I remember thinking, 'Somebody's going to fall and
>get killed.'" According to Ray Hill, a Houston activist who traced
>events prior to the crime and led the gay community's response, Buice
>and his friends "spent a couple of hours running around like mice in a
>treadmill. Then they wanted more action."
>
>The quest for riskier thrills sent the teens careening toward trouble.
>Led by the oldest among them, 23-year-old Brian Spake, the men piled
>back into their cars and headed to Montrose, a heavily gay neighborhood,
>for a teen male ritual that was gaining in popularity among the suburban
>set: hassling, harassing and occasionally assaulting homosexual men.
>
>According to police, it was not the first time many of the youths, and
>others like them, had taken part. The Houston gay and lesbian community
>had complained about the abuse to the police department for years with
>no result. In fact, Montrose was considered a kind of nocturnal
>playground. Westheimer Street, a major artery bisecting Montrose, was
>generally clogged on weekend nights with teenagers cruising the streets
>in their cars. When they grew bored of sitting in traffic jams, they
>would park and head toward a thriving circle of gay bars, cafés and
>restaurants looking for targets to vent their frustration.
>
>Despite being under the legal drinking age of 18, Buice remembers
>hanging out in both gay and non-gay bars in the area. "I know it's
>probably hard to understand, but I didn't hate gay people," he says. "I
>had gay friends. I had gay relatives. I'd gone to gay bars with them. I'
>d go to straight bars. It didn't really make any difference to me. If a
>guy hit on me, I'd just say, 'Hey, man, that's not my thing.' Some of my
>best friendships started that way."
>
>Yet there is no getting around the anti-gay MO of Buice's behavior that
>night-or his role in the killing. As he and his friends drove around
>Montrose, they began homing in on gay men. Spotting someone they
>believed adhered to their stereotype of a homosexual, they
>shouted-delighting in the bad pun-"Where's Heaven?" a reference to a
>popular gay dance club in the heart of the neighborhood. If the person
>would point to the bar or give them directions-confirmation in their
>minds that he was gay-they shouted slurs and made threatening gestures.
>According to police, several men were accosted in the same manner that
>evening before the pack converged on Broussard.
>
>By that point, the young men had gotten away with their activity for
>several hours and, as Hill puts it, "They were smelling blood." Just
>after the 2 a.m. closing of a bar near Heaven, they came across
>Broussard and two of his young friends. They were walking toward home,
>just blocks away. With only a few years separating victims and
>perpetrators, in another circumstance, as Buice now acknowledges, the
>young men actually might have been friends. But for Buice and his
>collaborators, at least on this night, sexual orientation was the
>ultimate dividing line, the personification of "other." It was what drew
>them together across their own boundaries. Four of the young men
>involved in the incident were Latino; one was black; and the other six
>white. In the racially charged culture of Texas teenagers, homophobia
>gave them common cause.
>
>After an angry exchange of words, several of the boys began chasing
>Broussard and his friends. Broussard headed into a dead-end road while
>his friends escaped down a busier street. Soon he was surrounded. One of
>the boys-it is not clear who-wielded a two-by-four with nails protruding
>from the end. Broussard struggled mightily, landing blows on Buice and
>the others. But he was soon overcome with exhaustion and the pummeling
>of fists and puncture wounds. As he lay dying, blood poured onto the
>pavement from a chest wound Buice had inflicted with his Buck
>knife-evidence that eventually led to the long sentence received by many
>of the men involved in the killing. Paul Broussard died on a hospital
>bed a few hours later.
>
>Thousands of young men waste away in Texas prisons, sentenced for
>everything from drug possession to rape and murder. But rarely do these
>young perpetrators find themselves in the middle of a morality play
>about the very definition-and progressive redefinition-of right and
>wrong, good and evil. Rarely are they in a position to offer insight
>into the circumstances of a serious social problem.
>
>On one level, Buice is a singular character. In an April 1999 open
>letter addressed to the radio station KPFT, Buice wrote that to "the gay
>and lesbian community I owe a momentous apology. A repentance for an act
>of atrocity. The night of July 4, 1991, haunts me every day. It has hurt
>me deep inside. I was involved in taking a man's life. If it were
>possible, I would sacrifice my own life to bring Paul back. But this is
>not conceivable. And I aspire that you will hear the cries of who I am
>today.
>
>"As I've grown older," the letter continued, "I have gained a more
>relative understanding of what took place that night in Houston. It was
>never my intention to harm anyone. Never could I possibly imagine I
>would take a human life or take part in any action which would inflict
>fatal injuries. But the fact remains: I did participate and I have taken
>responsibility for this. Of course I knew I was wrong. In my youth I
>made poor decisions. After years here in prison, I see how disruptive my
>life and attitudes were."
>
>Buice says he wrote the letter after hearing about the murder of gay
>student Matthew Shepard, from the University of Wyoming. Through
>television coverage of that killing and others like it, Buice said in
>the letter that he learned of "some hateful actions taken against the
>minority of.a different sexual orientation. This wounds my heart and I'm
>appalled to know that I, too, was involved in this type of action."
>
>Yet as eloquent and sincere as the letter appears, Buice often seems at
>a loss to explain the crime and the motive behind it. He simply can't
>reconcile his professed lack of antipathy for gay men with his attack on
>one.
>
>It doesn't help that Buice claims he "blacked out" the night of the
>incident. He remembers someone shouting, "Where's Heaven?" at passersby.
>His next recollection is he is in the car driving home, his clothing
>stained with Broussard's blood. It wasn't until he heard about the
>murder the next day that it dawned on him what he had done. "I was
>drinking and tripping on LSD," he says. "I probably could have done
>anything that night and not completely realized it."
>
>As for the inducement for the crime, he says that at least in his case,
>it had less to do with Broussard's sexual orientation than with the fact
>that the boys were sure they could get away with it. They viewed
>Montrose, with its burgeoning gay community and thriving nightlife, as a
>sort of lawless enclave, freed of the enormous social strictures of
>their everyday life in school and in their suburban homes, where their
>every move seemed monitored by teachers and parents. The sex lives of
>gay men appeared exotic and forbidden. That held an unmistakable allure,
>even if some of the boys expressed a fierce loathing for it. They had
>heard on the streets that police didn't care about hassling gays, who
>they also believed were likely to carry more cash, have more fashionable
>clothing, and were extremely unlikely to report incidents to
>authorities.
>
>It was a combustible mix-alcohol, drugs, male bonding and the odd
>combination of fear and loathing the boys felt about homosexuality.
>"There was a thrill-seeking aspect to it," Buice says, borrowing a term
>from a researcher who had interviewed him about the crime just days
>earlier. "It was something we could do together and get away with it. It
>was really more about our relationships and our sense of boredom than
>about the victim. It could really have been anybody. It just happened to
>be Paul."
>
>Buice says that the crime was not premeditated. "I can say for sure that
>none of the guys were killers," he says. "We never once talked about
>getting anyone. In my wildest dreams I could never imagine that I'd come
>home with blood on my hands that night. It was just something that sort
>of happened. A lot of things went wrong all at once."
>
>There is no doubt Buice has an ulterior motive in expressing remorse. He
>is eligible for parole in 2003, though it is highly unlikely that he
>will receive it, even though by all accounts he is a model inmate. He is
>studying for a college degree, and would like to pursue graduate courses
>in psychology, in part to help him "come to terms with my past and to
>help others."
>
>But, there is also the distinct possibility that he is completely
>sincere. He clearly likes the idea of making restitution to those who
>have suffered from his crime. He agreed to this interview only after I
>mailed him a copy of an earlier article I'd written about another young
>man who was convicted of a similar crime. It was titled, "A Gay-Bashing
>Killer Turns His Life Around."
>
>Upon meeting me for the first time, he commented that he would like that
>headline to be his life story. In the open letter-one of the few ever
>penned by a confessed gay basher-Buice offered help the gay community.
>He can't explain what form that help would take, but he suggested that
>by telling his story he might prevent others from making "the same
>mistake I have."
>
>Buice has convinced at least one important critic. Hill, himself a
>former prison inmate who has befriended Buice in the years since the
>murder, declared that it was evident that Buice had seen the error of
>his ways, that he had been punished enough, and that he should be given
>serious consideration for parole. "The question is whether you see the
>criminal justice system as a means of retribution or rehabilitation,"
>Hill says. "If you look at it in terms of rehabilitation, there is
>little question that Jon is now ready to be a good citizen."
>
>The person who matters most in Buice's quest for early parole is having
>none of it. For nearly a decade, Nancy Rodriques has battled the demons
>that swirl around the murder of her son, Paul Broussard, her first of
>three children by two husbands. She asks herself whether she was
>accepting enough when Paul came out to her not long before his death.
>She regrets not being able to comfort him after the beating and
>stabbing, when he was talking incoherently at the hospital. Even today,
>she often wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
>
>Rodriques lives on the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, where she earns a
>living selling tires. She spends most of her time outside work tending
>to her two grown children, David and Michele, and her grandson, Jalen,
>4. She hopes to take Jalen to a lesbian minister at the local Unitarian
>Universalist Church for a lesson on homophobia. "I want Jalen to know
>that it's okay for some boys to love other boys, and for girls to love
>other girls. I want him to be completely free of the ugliness
>surrounding Paul."
>
>She has focused most of her still simmering anger on the ten boys and in
>combating their efforts to win early release. She has testified at
>parole hearings, lobbied state legislators, spoken at hate crimes
>rallies, and toured the prisons where her son's killers are locked up.
>Because the perpetrators were given sentences ranging from parole to
>seven years to 45, depending on their level of involvement in the actual
>assault, she has faced the possibility that one of her son's killers
>will be released nearly every year since they were incarcerated. In
>March, one such perpetrator was in fact released. "My goal in life is to
>live long enough to make sure that Buice serves his full term," says the
>fifty-six-year-old. "That would make me 87-I think I can make it."
>
>When it comes to gay bashers, she has reason to be suspicious about
>Texas justice. Just five years before Broussard's death, Dallas Judge
>Jack Hampton had gone easy on an eighteen-year-old who with a pal had
>shot to death two gay men on the grounds that "prostitutes and gays
>[are] at about the same level. I'd be hard put to give somebody life for
>killing a prostitute."
>
>In Texas at least, it seemed kids could simply claim that perpetrators
>had made a pass at them and then get away with murder. At every parole
>hearing for one of her son's perpetrators, she remains vigilant of even
>the most subtle suggestion that her son was somehow less than fully
>human. She believes he is deserving of the same protection and justice
>as everyone else.
>
>Between drags on a cigarette, Rodriques struggles to contain her sorrow
>and fury. "I have good days and bad days," she says. "Paul was my
>firstborn and we had a very intense attachment." On her desk in her
>modest home lies an envelope with the autopsy reports and photographs
>from the murder scene. Nine years after the murder, she still refuses to
>look at them. She has set up an elaborate system so that she never has
>to see them. When they are required as evidence in a parole hearing, she
>has a friend make copies and place them in another envelope so she can
>mail them. "I can face almost anything but that," she says. "It may
>sound silly, but that's where I draw the line.
>
>"I just couldn't bear to see what those boys did to Paul. As far as I'm
>concerned, there is no way they can ever pay enough of a price for what
>they have done to my boy."
>
>©2001 Chris Bull
>