Lesbian youth, in droves, turn out to mourn

By Mick Meenan

By late afternoon on Tuesday, it is already dark under the scaffolded roofing on the corner of sidewalk where Sakia Gunn and four friends waited in the early morning hours Sunday for the bus that the 15-year-old expected would bring her home to her grandmother.
Sakia never made it.

Now, two days later, a large, makeshift shrine, constructed between two upright girders, stretches from the sidewalk clear up to the planks of wood above. The shrine is festooned with balloons, and emblazoned with ribbons of the rainbow colors, the insignia of gay and lesbian freedom, and scores of Sakia’s friends, classmates, and even passing strangers, most of them adolescent African American lesbians, have etched their names and their good-byes in the cramped spaces on the green oak tag paper taped to the wall.

A basketball, autographed by her friends, lies next to bunches of flowers and a ceramic crucifix. The phalanx of candles has been lit and tended to since shortly after hundreds of Newark’s lesbian and gay youth learned of the death of their schoolmate and lesbian sister, Sakia Gunn.

For residents of hardscrabble neighborhoods, such memorials are ubiquitous. Unlike most other memorials, however, this one has been constructed by lesbians, young African American women, nearly all of whom are high school students. Some attend West Side High School, where Sakia was completing her sophomore year. They hail as well from Bloomfield Tech, Columbia, Weequahic, and Barringer High Schools.

Valencia Bailey, 15, one of Sakia’s friends and a fellow West Side High School student, accompanied Sakia into New York City on Saturday night, then back to Newark. She was waiting with Sakia and her three other friends when a white vehicle with two men in it pulled up to the curb.

Valencia described what next transpired.

“‘Yo, shorty, come here,’ one of them said. We told them, ‘No, we’re, okay. We’re not like that. We’re gay.’ They kept at it and one of the girls started to give him some lip. ”

Sakia’s killer emerged from the car.

Shortly before, Chantell Woodridge,17, another lesbian among the group returning from New York, had just said goodnight to her friends and was walking down Market Street, when she heard a ruckus behind her.

She quickly returned to find her sister, Kahmya, being choked by one of the men.

“My sister was foaming at the mouth,” Chantell recalled. “He had her by the neck. He told Sakia, ‘Come here.’ She said, ‘No, you’re not my father.’ Me and Valencia was fighting him. He grabbed Sakia by the neck and put a knife there. She started fighting him and got away. She swung once at him. When she tried to swing again, he stabbed her.”

Sakia’s killer jumped into the white vehicle and it sped away.
Valencia raced to a car that had stopped for a red light.
“ ‘Please, mister, please,’ I said as I was banging on his window. ‘Can you please take us to the hospital?’ ”

The young women were acutely aware that Sakia was bleeding profusely.

The anonymous Good Samaritan took all five young women in his car to University Hospital, a short distance away. However, Sakia’s massive blood loss spelled the impossible for doctors who tried to keep her alive.

“She died in my arms in the emergency,” said Valencia. “They rolled her into the back and tried to save her. But they couldn’t.”

On Tuesday evening, a large contingent of young women congregated and reminisced, switching, as is their adolescent wont, from excited banter to heart-felt sobs, muffled against the shoulders of the young friends who consoled them.

The square of sidewalk concrete still stained by Sakia’s blood has been converted into another shrine—foot-high votive candles cordoning off the steps of pedestrians. In crayon and chalk, more messages are written.

“We love you always,” one says. “R.I.P.”

At a Wednesday evening vigil, mourners flocked to the sight to pray and memorialize Sakia. She would have turned 16 on May 26. Mourners respectfully sidestepped the bloodstains as the throng of mostly young women prayed and recited poetry and verses that eulogized their friend. The young women all began speaking clearly and eloquently, but not before tears choked off their breath and their friends pushed forward to embrace them.

“I lost my best friend,” said Spanky Ross, 18.

She wears a backwards baseball cap and a bracelet of colored beads that demonstrates her lesbian pride. Sakia’s school portrait, fast become the young lesbian’s death image, graces Spanky’s T-shirt.
“At 4:44 Sunday morning I called Sakia on the phone. We had been together on the Pier but I went home to Brooklyn. They left for Newark.

“When I called, her uncle told me she had been stabbed and she was not going to make it.”

Momentarily, it becomes too difficult for her to speak. Her face freezes.

“I’m crying inside, but I know if she was here she would want me to stay strong. I’m dealing with it in my own way.”

As they have from Sunday morning on, droves of young people, predominantly young lesbians, visit the site of Sakia’s stabbing. Broad and Market Streets form a busy intersection of pedestrians and lines of city buses. A large police booth, nearly as long as a bus, occupies the opposite corner of the intersection from where Sakia was stabbed. A police officer was not stationed in the booth Sunday morning.

Late Thursday afternoon, Richard McCullough, 29, turned himself into Newark Police, just as a rally of hundreds decrying Sakia’s murder broke up at City Hall. A warrant had earlier been issued for McCullough’s arrest in connection with the murder.

On Monday, Lt. Todd McClendon, a Newark police spokesperson, had provided descriptions of two men being sought.

“Both are black males wearing white T-shirts and blue jeans. One was 5 feet, 11 inches tall, with a stocky build and hair in braids or dreadlocks. The other was 5 feet, 9 inches tall with a medium build and a cornrow hairstyle. Both are in their mid to late twenties.”

Between the time of that description and McCullough’s surrender, the Star–Ledger reported that another police spokesperson described McCullough, who lives on South 15th Street, as five feet 6 inches, 210 pounds with braided hair.

On Tuesday morning, the white getaway car that had been sought by police was recovered in East Orange.

The Essex County prosecutor’s office has determined that Sakia was the victim of a bias crime. Upon conviction under the state’s hate crimes law, those responsible for her murder will face stiffer penalties.

Stacy Nickerson was among one of the first adults summoned to University Hospital early Sunday morning. Sakia and Stacy’s daughter, Toni, 15, dated briefly and had maintained a friendship. Stacy often cooked dinner for the girls and spent time discussing with them their travails and triumphs as teens and young women coming into full awareness of their sexual orientation.

“Toni first told me in the seventh grade, ‘I don’t like boys,’ she said. At first I didn’t believe her,” said Stacy. “Three and a half months ago, Toni brought Sakia home to introduce to me. They were going out with each other. Sakia became like a daughter to me. It’s very painful, because she was so young. This is very hard.”

At first, security officers would not allow Stacy to enter the room where Sakia lay. The Catholic chaplain intervened and Stacy entered the back room.

“She was laying there with a plastic tube coming from out her mouth,” said Stacy. “Her body was covered by a white sheet. It appears that they had unhooked everything because they couldn’t save her. But there was blood everywhere. She had on her white do-rag she always wears and it was filled with blood. Both her hands were full of blood.”

Sakia’s grandmother, Thelma Gunn, her legal guardian, now lies in the cardiac intensive care unit three floors above the emergency room. Upon receiving word of the stabbing of Sakia, Ms. Gunn collapsed and suffered a mild heart attack. She spoke from her hospital bed with a natural poise and politeness, neatly coiffed and alert. She was circumspect about the fact that Sakia was lesbian.
“I knew about her and I accepted her. I knew where she went with her friends. She always came home to me, though. It was never a problem.”

Ms. Gunn raised Sakia from her infancy. She is the matriarch of a large extended family that includes Sakia’s mother, her siblings, as well as many cousins, aunts, and uncles.

“She was my oldest granddaughter,” Ms. Gunn recalled. “That was my baby. I loved her. And she loved me.”

Victoria Dingle, 16, a lesbian, was with Sakia on the Pier along West Street at the end of Christopher Street Saturday night. She also attends West Side High School.

“The pier is somewhere we go to feel open about ourselves and have fun,” she said. “Me and Sakia and some friends were just chilling and having fun and feeling good about being together.”

When the group of young women returned to Newark, Victoria jumped in a cab and went home while the others walked up to Broad Street to catch the bus.

A consortium of local clergy orchestrated a memorial service and vigil Wednesday night. Rev. Jacqueline Holland, a lesbian, is the pastor of the Liberation and Truth Church of Newark, an LGBT-affirming congregation.

Deacon Debbie Summers also arrived to console the grieving young women and offer the services of the congregation as the community copes with its loss.

“People are not going to hide. We are not afraid. We want justice. We are going to continue to be gay. We are going to continue to be lesbian,” Rev. Holland announced to the crowd of several hundred.
Anthony Hall, 43, an uncle of Sakia’s, thanked the mourners for attending the vigil. He then launched into a fierce attack on the administration of Mayor Sharp James.

“We want to know where the cops were,” he said. “They were supposed to be in that booth twenty-four hours like the mayor promised in his last campaign. It might have saved her life.”
Joy Black, a lesbian activist, said, “We want the governor, the mayor, and yes, the president to know that we will not tolerate hate crimes.”
The crowd cheered loudly.

“Sakia was you and you were her. We need to come out for her. Until we are treated equally, until we have same-sex marriage, we are not equal.”

Pastor Thomas Ellis of Newark’s Enough is Enough Coalition, said, “We see killers glorified everywhere we look. The real issue is that a young lady was killed. We go out to where people are shot, killed, beaten down. We plan on doing grief counseling for all these kids who are now suffering.”

Basil Lucas and Emily Bieber of New York City’s Anti-Violence Project, an LGBT advocacy anti-bias group, were both in the crowd passing out literature which offered hotline numbers for gay and lesbian youth who might need counseling following Sakia’s death.

Lucas denounced the murder and applauded its designation as a hate crime.

Ashley Jackson, 17, last spoke to her friend on Saturday evening just moments before Sakia left for Greenwich Village.

“Just now they got police officers in that booth because Sakia died. They killed Sakia because she was gay. If Sakia had been dressed like a regular female, if she had on tight jeans and she didn’t have on her Globetrotter’s outfit, this never would have happened,” said Jackson in reference to Sakia’s preferred style of dress.

Newark is a city not unfamiliar with the struggle for civil rights and equality.

On Thursday afternoon, another contingent of several hundred youth, again comprised mostly of lesbians, met at the site of Sakia’s stabbing and marched down Broad Street to Newark’s City Hall in a peaceful, yet vocal, protest demonstration.

The young people lined the steps and filed into place on the sidewalk as police officers lined the street and traffic on Broad Street began to slow as drivers caught a glimpse.

Toni Gunn, Sakia’s mother, addressed the hundreds of mourners.
“Nobody had the right to take my child away,” she said. “My daughter did not die in vain. She will be remembered.”

Sakia’s uncle, Anthony Hall, led a chant of “No justice, no peace,” and the crowd also sang verses from We Shall Overcome, the paean of an era in which the African American struggle for civil rights burned in the American consciousness, yet also a time when most of the demonstrators had not yet been born.

A large number of adult women, many of whom are the lesbian mothers of high school youth who were among those assembled, stood above the group on the higher steps of City Hall as well as on the fringes of the mass, silent protectors of their offspring. Their stoic presence represented the vigilance and respect many of Newark’s older adult residents still harbor for the cause and struggle for equality and justice.

Valencia’s mother, Gail Bailey, a Gunn family friend, said, “I know my daughter is a lesbian and I love her for it. I am glad I had her before I came out. Now we have the sorrow of the death of one of our sisters to deal with. But we will help each other through it.”
Vera Amons and her daughter Denise stood on the sidewalk holding a large Gay Pride Flag as a television camera and newspaper stringers photographed them.

Sheree Evans, 47, of Newark, stood silently on one of the upper steps, surveying the throng of people arrayed below. When asked why she had attended the event, she responded, simply and succinctly, “I am a lesbian.”

Sakia’s friends and acquaintances reminisced about their fallen sister. They discussed her affinity for basketball, and how she aspired to play in the Women’s National Basketball Association. Sakia had also wanted to join the marching band at West Side as a drummer.

Sakia was described as a loyal girlfriend and a loving daughter.
Atisha Davis, 16, Jamiekai Johnson, 17, as well as Victoria Dingle, all of them from West Side High School, arrived to mourn the loss of their schoolmate and fellow lesbian.

Toni Nickerson, Sakia’s friend and ex-girlfriend, talked about how the killers’ perceptions of lesbians may have played into the murder.
“You have fems and aggressives, or AG’s. Those guys came up to Sakia and her friends because some of them were AGs and they didn’t respect that.”

There were young men at Thursday’s protest march as well
Marcees Dixon, 16, Sakia’s half-brother, said, “ I heard about her death when I got to school on Monday. I just left school. I couldn’t concentrate.”

Marcus Dinkins, 16, a gay youth, said, “She was one of my closest friends.”

Arthur Thornton, 16, another gay youth who attended health class with Sakia at West Side, spent his time during the march running through the written remarks he intended to deliver on the steps of City Hall.

One of the speakers at Thursday’s demonstration was Newark City Councilmember Hector Corchado of the North Ward. When asked what protocol was in place in the city’s public schools to offer grief counseling and support services, particularly to the school system’s lesbian and gay youth, the legislator acknowledged the question’s importance, but was unable to provide an answer, suggesting that the president of the school board would be best informed to answer.
Earlier that day, Fernand Williams, the principal of West Side, instructed his receptionist to inform the media that all inquiries needed to go through the school district’s media spokesperson. That official, Michelle Baldwin, never returned a phone call.

Meanwhile, Laquetta Nelson, a lesbian, and the founder and former president of New Jersey’s Stonewall Democrats, was asking by way of a bullhorn, “Where’s Sharpe James? Come out of the closet, Mr. Mayor.”

Later, she expressed her awe at the sheer magnitude of lesbian youth assembled.

“I have been a part of many demonstrations. Never have I seen anything like this.”

The mayor of Newark never did appear to address the mourners.
Despite a sudden drizzle, the crowd did not diminish. Rather, the rain moved the youngsters to share umbrellas.

Rev. Holland addressed the demonstrators.

“I am here to tell you that God loves you exactly the way you are.”

The bespectacled minister, professorial and graceful in her demeanor, a bastion of calm throughout the crisis following Sakia’s death, then stood aside, surveying the throng quietly, as others stepped up to the bullhorn. Finally, after days of watching over her flock, mostly of queer youth of color, the clergywoman wept, covering her face with both hands before a colleague, the Rev. Kevin Taylor, of the Unity Fellowship Congregation, another LGBT-affirming ministry, wrapped her in his arms and gently rocked her as she cried.

Sakia Gunn’s funeral is Friday in Newark.