Understandably, there was national outrage and sadness about last year's very probable hate crime murder of a young gay man from South Carolina, Sean William Kennedy, 20, of Greenville. A stranger with hatred in his heart and homophobia swirling in his mind is said to have thrown a single, fatal punch at Kennedy--a college student with a life's worth of promise--on a sidewalk in downtown Greenville in May, 2007. Less than two months later in early July, a west coast picnic outing with friends similarly ended in a violent, homophobia-fueled death. The single-punch hate crime murder of 26 year old Satendar Singh outside Sacramento, California, will be another tic-mark in the "Murder and non-negligent manslaughter" column of the FBI's annual report of hate crime statistics for 2007 to be released later this year. Whether or not the FBI chooses to bring Mr. Singh's alleged killer to justice is another story; Andrey Vusik, 29, fled to his native Russia and there seems to be no political will to have him returned to the United States to face a murder charge, although he has been charged with manslaughter. Fizzling out quickly in the daily media lifecycle are the dozens of hate crime attacks on gay men that do not, thankfully, end in a homicide. But for the angle or force of a particular punch or shove any of these gay hate crime assaults could end up as tragically as the attacks on Sean Kennedy and Satendar Singh.
One such attack occurred on April 12, 2008, in Champaign, Illinois. Barely mentioned by the media and not covered at all by his own school's newspaper, gay University of Illinois student Steven Velasquez, 20, of Urbana, Illinois was walking on or near campus with two female friends and a male friend when, allegedly, a stranger to the group began yelling anti-gay slurs directed at Velasquez. According to one of two news reports I found on the internet about the attack, Velasquez was shoved so forcefully to the ground by the assailant that the U of I student was rendered unconscious and required medical attention. At the risk of calling Velasquez lucky, unlike Sean Kennedy and Satendar Singh less than a year before, he did not become a gay hate crime murder victim. From hearing his tearful, brave words about his attack and when it occurred in his life (it happened at a time when he was just beginning to embrace his sexual orientation after a period of self-struggle), we know Velasquez was also psychologically wounded by the ordeal.
The first media account of the attack piqued my curiosity about the man arrested in the case. Amanda Evans of WCIA 3 News reported the name of the alleged assailant, Brett Vanasdlen, but she gave no other details about him, except that he was out on bond. No age, no address, no other details about the alleged attacker or how he was apprehended. From reviewing dozens of hate crime stories this lack of reported information struck me as unusual, and it made me want to dig deeper. Since I'm no investigative journalist, digging deeper for me started with a simple google search of "Brett Vanasdlen." Here's what I found.
Brett Vanasdlen (sometimes spelled VanAsdlen), shown here during high school, is a 2007 high school graduate from Minooka, Illinois, a middle-America, rural, dot-on-the-map just 4.25 square miles in size with a nearly all-white population of under 4,000 located 50 miles southwest of Chicago. By the numerous published reports of his athletic skills, in high school Vanasdlen was a talented baseball player (mostly a catcher) with a promising college career. The Chicago Tribune, for example, commented on his contribution in the 2007 WJOL Area Invite in Joliet, Illinois last April. On opposite ends of the country, as Vanasdlen played ball at the Joliet tournament in the last weeks of his high school career, Sean Kennedy and Satendar Singh were, unknowingly, living out the last weeks of their lives. After high school, Vanasdlen attended Purdue University, where he played baseball for the Boilermakers for one semester. In fact, he played in only one game in 2007 while at Purdue and he went hitless with four at-bats. For reasons unknown, but perhaps because he played little or because he played poorly, Vanasdlen returned to Illinois transferring to Parkland College in Champaign where he played baseball (first base) for the Cobras until April 8, 2008, according to the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) website. He played in 27 Parkland games starting on February 29, 2008, batting 73 times with 25 hits, a respectable .342 batting average. He knocked in 19 RBI's and two home runs, and when Vanasdlen was on the team, the Cobras racked up an impressive 21-7 record. One factoid about six-foot-four-inch, 220-pound Vanasdlen that I couldn't help connect to the attack on Mr. Velasquez was a quote by Vanasdlen's Minooka high school baseball coach, Jeff Petrovic. Coach Petrovic said: "Brett uses his size to his advantage and hits with a lot of power." Though he was referring to hitting a baseball, not a gay man, Petrovic's quote about Vanasdlen might make the prosecuting attorney salivate, I thought. But, I also thought that with Vanasdlen's size and power, it's lucky Steven Velasquez wasn't killed, assuming Vanasdlen was his assailant. For reasons unknown, it appears from his NJCAA webpage that he stopped playing baseball after the double-header between Parkland College and Lincoln College on April 8, just four days before the assault on Mr. Velasquez. Why? Why had a talented baseball player stopped playing ball in mid-season? An injury, perhaps? Academic difficulties? Substance abuse? I had other questions about Vanasdlen. Why had this player transferred after just one semester from a Division I team (Purdue) to a Division II team (Parkland), only to stop playing days before his arrest for a hate crime attack?
The second news account of the assault on Mr. Velasquez kept me puzzling even more about Vanasdlen. On April 16, 2008, Steve Bauer wrote the following at The News-Gazette.com:
"According to Champaign police, Benjamin Vanasdlen, 18, is accused of pushing the Urbana man, causing him to fall down and strike his head about 1:35 a.m. Saturday. The Urbana man was knocked unconscious and was taken to a hospital for treatment of a head injury, police said...Vanasdlen, 18, who listed an address in the 2000 block of Moreland Boulevard, Champaign, was arraigned and pleaded innocent Monday to a Class 4 felony charge of hate crime. Bond for Vanasdlen, who also listed an address in Minooka, was set at $10,000, and he was due to return to court for a pretrial hearing May 6."
I know journalists sometimes get facts wrong, but the name of a person charged with a crime shouldn't be one of them. What's the assailant's name, Benjamin Vanasdlen or Brett Vanasdlen? My google and white pages searches of "Benjamin Vanasdlen" returned nothing but the citation of Steve Bauer's article. I learned, however, that the 2000 block of Moreland Boulevard in Champaign, Illinois, is just a few miles from Parkland College, where Brett Vanasdlan attended college and played baseball.
To find out the actual name and identity of the person arrested for allegedly attacking Mr. Velasquez, I google-searched the name "Brett Vanasdlen" again. What I found this time was a blog of the attack by someone in the Seattle area named Tom at 2015place.com, which, according to the blogger, is a "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Inter-sexed and Allies (GLBTQIA) [blogsite] Operated by a homosexual providing news and more intended for the above mentioned audience." Tom's blog, posted two days after Steven Velasquez was attacked, was actually just a cut-and-paste of Amanda Evans' report, but still, Tom cared enough about the story that I thought he might follow up on the lead I gave to him in my April 18th Anonymous post:
"Anonymous said... After doing a google search of the name "Brett Vanasdlen" and after reading a second media report about the attack on Mr. Steven Velasquez, I began to wonder this: is Benjamin Vanasdlen (who in one media report is the name of the man charged with the hate crime) Brett Vanasdlen? Did Vanasdlen give an alias name to the court/police? My google search reveals a baseball player from Minooka, IL (Brett Vanasdlen) who graduated from Minooka High School, then played baseball for one semester at Purdue U. before transferring to Parkland College in Champaign, IL. His baseball skills and his physical power are well-documented on the internet.
Is this the same man as the accused? Is someone (the media, the school, the defendant) hiding his true identity? Could it be that the accused is the college baseball jock I've found on the internet? My search in Illinois and neighboring areas found no Benjamin Vanasdlen, just Brett and his younger brother Jon."
Blogger Tom replied to my post stating he has no more information about the hate crime assault on Steven Velasquez; however, he said when he has new information, he'll share it. Curiously, just eleven hours after posting my response to Tom's blog, someone else posted a comment about the Champaign, Illinois hate crime attack at Tom's blogsite; it was a response that had me even more curious than I had been previously. This anonymous posting reads as follows:
"all this is bullshit brett didnt do shit its jsut some pussy looking for a way out "
That posting prompted a number of questions. First, why would someone visiting a gay/lesbian/bisexual, etc., blogsite rush to the defense of someone accused of committing a hate crime against a gay man? That someone apparently knows Brett personally given the content of the posting. Also, how common is it, really, for someone posting at a GLBTQIA blogsite to use the word pussy in a sexist and emasculating way? Notice too the word "just" is misspelled. Clearly, the poster is nervous and defensive, but why? Is Brett Vanasdlen, like me, trolling the internet to find out how much information there is about the attack on Steven Velasquez? Would Brett Vanasdlen really be so desperate as to make a pathetic, albeit disguised, denial of committing a violent hate crime against a gay man--at a gay-themed blogsite no less? Would he be so careless to not even bother to at least pose as a gay man when attempting to distance himself from the accusations against him at said gay-themed blogsite? The questions that I posted at Tom's blogsite still remained unanswered more than a week after the hate crime attack: did Vanasdlen give a fake name to the court/police, and if so, to what end? To avoid getting suspended from school or the baseball team? Or did Steve Bauer and The News-Gazette err in reporting the name Benjamin? The blog-posting person claiming to know Brett Vanasdlen--and to not so articulately profess his innocence--led me to think more and more that reporter Amanda Evans had the alleged assailant's name correct. And as I thought more about Steven Velasquez's attack, I also wondered what was Vanasdlen doing out alone in the early morning hours at the time Steven Velasquez was walking down the street with his friends, and where was Vanasdlen going?
Some of these questions were answered on April 21st, after I spoke with the Circuit Clerk in Champaign, Illinois, after I spoke with an administrator from Parkland College, and after I received an email from Steve Bauer (on April 17th I twice emailed Mr. Bauer inquiring about the actual name of the assailant in the Velasquez hate crime assault). The Circuit Clerk's office told me that Brett Vanasdlen was arrested by city police and charged with committing a hate crime on April 12th. Steve Bauer told me that he double-checked the information provided by the Champaign County State's Attorney's Office and the records in the Circuit Clerk's Office, and that the man charged with assaulting Steven Velasquez was indeed Brett Vanasdlen. One question answered: the defendant did not provide false information about his identity; instead, The News-Gazette printed the wrong name. Parkland College informed me that they are aware that one of their students was arrested and charged with a hate crime. They also told me that the student arrested was suspended from the school's baseball team. A second question answered: Brett Vanasdlen, the now-former Parkland College baseball player, is Brett Vanasdlen, the accused hate crime perpetrator.
Readers might be wondering why I care. It's simple really. It's called fighting back, and here's the possible push-back in this case. If the man who assaulted Steven Velasquez is someone who stands to earn millions of dollars in a few year's time playing major league baseball, even a slight chance, I want to do what I can to prevent that. I want to do what I can to stop a violent homophobe from becoming a well-paid role model to American boys who dream of playing in the big league. The thought of that happening, the thought of hate being rewarded like that, sickens me.
The nervous blog-poster may be right about one thing: the assailant in the Steven Velasquez hate crime assault case may be looking for a way out. He may be looking for a way out of a life that is sliding downward, toward a jail sentence. He may be looking for a way out of the shame and disgrace that will be the talk of whatever town he's from. Or, he may simply be a confused, self-loathing young American man raised to love baseball and taught to hate gay men looking for a way out of the closet. Whatever the reason, one thing we can all be inspired by is the absolute courage it took Steven Velasquez to appear on television still acutely pained from being called a faggot then assaulted to unconsciousness on the street in front of his friends. Affirming his newly embraced sexuality on camera and vowing to seek justice in his assault case, Steven Velasquez showed the world his fortitude. Steven, you hit a home run.
