This photo is from the Rocky Mountain News.
Fred C Martinez Jr. was a 16 year old high school sophomore from Cortez, Colorado. He identified himself as "half-Navajo, openly gay, Two-spirit, and transgender." In June of 2001, his body was found brutally murdered. Shaun Murphy, then 18, pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Murphy was not charged with a hate crime as "the legal definition of hate crime does not apply to crimes based on the victim's gender identity or gender expression."According to a Wikipedia article, "Transgender is the state of one's "gender identity" (self-identification as woman, man, or neither) not matching one's "assigned sex" (identification by others as male or female based on physical/genetic sex). "Transgender" does not imply any specific form of sexual orientation; transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, or asexual. "
To learn more about Fred C Martinez Jr, follow these links:
Families United Against Hate
Rocky Mountain News articles regarding the case
An obituary
Temenos Page for Fred Martinez Jr
Wikipedia Article about Fred Martinez
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