A death, a beating and vandalism have some in the gay and transgender community wondering if the hate will continue.
By AARON SHAROCKMAN
Published December 22, 2003
[Times photo: Dirk Shadd]
Mark Grassl, 29, right, holds a candle during a vigil to honor Lucas McCauley, whom Grassl had known since the fourth grade, on Sunday night in Largo Central Park.
LARGO - A group of equal rights activists say escalating tensions in the area boiled over earlier this month when a cross-dressing hospital employee was fatally stabbed in his apartment.
Now they're worried they could be next.
Meeting Sunday night in Largo Central Park to remember Lucas McCauley, 30, who was killed after spending the night dressed as "Reshae" in a popular transgender nightclub, members of the gay and transgender community said they feel threatened by a recent rash of crimes.
"It just seems to me in the last three weeks, the levels of acts against minorities on a whole have been increasing and have been totally intolerable," said Janice Carney, 53, director of the Florida Gender Equality Project. "The climax was a transgender woman being so brutally murdered."
Raised in Wisconsin, McCauley moved here in 1978 and worked as a unit secretary at Morton Plant Hospital. He worked dressed as a man, but frequented a nightclub dressed as a woman for the past six years.
McCauley had been a regular at Club Z109, which caters to the gay and transgender community, friends said.
On Dec. 13, McCauley left the club with William "Billy" McHenry, 34, who has been charged with the killing. McHenry was being held Sunday at the Pinellas County Jail without bail.
"We don't know what to think," said Carney, who was born a man but underwent a sex-change operation several years ago. "We're just scared."
More than 60 people gathered to share memories of McCauley, including his mother, Kim McCauley. After two ministers spoke, the group lighted candles and stood silently to reflect on the death.
They hope the simple ceremony becomes a reminder of the need for universal acceptance.
"It renews our hope for tolerance for all," said Karen Doering, a Tampa lawyer with the National Center for Lesbian Rights. "It was really a moving, emotional moment."
McCauley's slaying is one of a series of unsettling crimes in the past month in Pinellas County.
In Tarpon Springs, a gay couple and their friends were attacked by three men late as they were leaving a popular Greek restaurant last month, police said.
John A. Himonetos, 21, Stamatios N. Kannis, 22, and Michael Kitsos, 21, all of Tarpon Springs, were charged by police in the beating, which police designated as a hate crime.
In Saint Petersburg, someone cut holes through a series of vinyl posters from an exhibition titled "Coexistence" on display in Straub Park. The posters are there through January as part of a traveling exhibit brought to the area by the Florida Holocaust Museum.
Then a vandal spray-painted "Why profit from the deaths of millions of Jews?" on the outside of the museum, 55 Fifth St. S in St. Petersburg.
Police have no suspects in those cases.
Doering, who helped organize the vigil, said people are worried that these crimes could continue to escalate.
"Something very frightening is happening in the Tampa Bay area," Doering said. "We all feel fear."
- Times staff photographer Dirk Shadd contributed to this report.
