On October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming, was beaten, tortured, tied to a fence, and left for dead by local teenagers all because of his sexuality. Shortly before Matthew’s death, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old African American man from Jasper, Texas, was found decapitated and dismembered on a road near his hometown. The perpetrators tied him up and dragged his body with their truck. The men who committed this terrible crime had connections with the Ku Klux Klan and held white supremacist ideologies. Two days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona, was savagely murdered by an attacker who thought that because he wore a turban, he was a follower of Osama
