Sakia Gunn
At 15 she told a man at a bus stop that she was a lesbian – and was stabbed to death. Her murder changed Newark.
Sakia Gunn grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and was a student at Westside High School. She identified as a lesbian and, like many queer young people from Newark, spent weekends in Greenwich Village in New York to escape the harassment of everyday life.
On the night of 11 May 2003, on her way home with friends, she was waiting for a bus in downtown Newark when two men approached the girls. The girls rejected them and said they were lesbians. One of the men became violent and stabbed Sakia in the chest. She died shortly afterwards in the arms of her cousin and best friend, Valencia Bailey. She was 15.
The case was one of the first prosecuted as a bias murder under New Jersey’s hate crime law. In 2005 the perpetrator pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter and bias intimidation and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Hundreds of people protested, and some 2,500 are said to have attended the funeral. The national media, however, paid little attention: one study counted 21 articles in major newspapers about her murder, compared with 659 about the murder of Matthew Shepard.
Grief turned into a movement. Activists founded the Newark Pride Alliance, and in 2013 the city’s first LGBTQ community centre opened. In 2023 part of Halsey Street was renamed Sakia Gunn Way, and in 2024 her name was added to the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall Inn.