Autistic man murdered

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I found this. I'm not sure if it applies to anything, but i thought i'd post it anyway.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=612900


Schoolboy denies murdering autistic man Tue Aug 12 20081

A schoolboy told police he stabbed an autistic man in a Sydney public toilet block after the man dropped his trousers and grabbed him, a jury has been told.

Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC told the NSW Supreme Court jury the teenager also said the man joked about giving him a "wedgie" and grabbed him in a kind of bear hug.

The teenager, who was 16 at the time and cannot be named, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Gerard Fleming, 35, at Narrabeen on Sydney's northern beaches in June last year.

Ms Cunneen said Mr Fleming suffered from Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism.

He was stabbed twice in the toilets which, Ms Cunneen said, were a gay beat where homosexual men engaged in sexual activity after dark.

Ms Cunneen said the Crown contended the teenager had not been acting in self-defence or under provocation - the issues which she described as central to the trial.

"The issue will be what level of culpability he had when that stabbing took place," she said.

That night the teenager went to some parties before being dropped at Narrabeen around 11pm.

"I think you will find it is common ground between the prosecution and defence that the accused encountered Mr Fleming just outside the toilet and they then drank beer in the toilet," she said.

She alleged that after the teenager stabbed Mr Fleming he quickly left the scene, while the victim managed to get to a bus seat across the road.

When Mr Fleming was taken away in an ambulance, he was conscious and agitated, telling a paramedic the name, age and school of the teenager who is now on trial, saying he had just met him, the court was told.

After his arrest on June 25, the teenager told police they had been drinking in the toilet because it had been raining.

The schoolboy said he stabbed Mr Fleming after the older man emerged from a cubicle wearing his underpants but with his trousers around his knees.

A number of witnesses told the jury Mr Fleming obviously suffered from some condition and was like a child in many ways.

His neighbour Diana Van Bell said that in August 2006, Mr Fleming told her he was gay and went to gay beats.

She said she had intervened when he was being harassed by a couple outside their building.

"Gerard was saying: 'I suffer from autism, I might look a bit different, but I would not hurt anyone'," she said.

Ms Van Bell said he later told her they had been calling him a "pedophile or a poofter".

Diane Mantell, who knew Mr Fleming all his life, described him as a "happy, jolly boy", telling the jury he had dinner with her and her family on the night of the stabbing.

She said she had told him not to go to the "tram shed", the name she gave to the bus stop which included the toilet block.

She said she told him "there are homosexuals in that area", but he excitedly replied that the tram shed was a heritage listed building, where coffee could be bought.

The trial is continuing before Justice David Kirby.

Meeting in public toilets after dark for sex is pretty greasy.

oh i remember this murder, we had a brief discussion about it here at the time, thanks for the link, i was interested to follow the court case. I didn't see any mention of it in the smh today!

It was unclear at the time as to whether the guy was gay or not or just naive, the defence will try for a 'homosexual advance' panic angle so I guess they hope to prove that. I suppose we'll find out.

Could it have actually been a homosexual advance? In that case, panic is understandable. All men do not welcome anal sex. Some, but not all. Fears of anal rape are not irrational.

I fear anal rape.

well hopefully the defence won't call you as an expert witness.

From memory there's actually 4 teenagers involved in the murder, I think they are accessories to murder and this one guy used the weapon.

I am not involved directly with the case, so it's unlilkely I would be called as a witness. But if I had been there when the trousers dropped, and there had been some kind of assault ... obviously I would have intervened. Had it been two guys consensually enjoying each other, whoah that would have been embarassing. There's no crime where there is consent.

fair enough if he was freaked out and a bit scared, but there's a big difference between getting a knife out and warning someone away and getting a knife out and stabbing them twice.

Yeah the fact that he had 3 friends there doesn't bear out a 'homosexual advance panic' defence. I think his family claim he's not but sometimes they're the last to know. He was a churchgoing christian.

This article might give a bit more background, I think it's from the funeral.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/st ... 02,00.html

Tears for lovable misfit left to die
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Peter Lalor | June 23, 2007

OF all the things that torment the friends and family of Gerard Fleming it is the thought of the violence, confusion and mute terror of the gentle 35-year-old Sydney man's last night.

They fret that he bled to death, alone in a public place, too frightened to call for help.

On Thursday this week almost 600 people spilled from St Kieran's church on the northern beaches and celebrated the extraordinary life of the quietly spoken Christian who suffered from a mild form of Asperger's syndrome -- a type of autism -- and seemed to show up everywhere, at any time.

Some called him "Where's Gerard" for his ability to appear smiling at a function or church meeting, whether invited or not. He was, they said, always welcome. And they cried as they tried to reconcile his peaceful nature with the violence of his death.

Fleming was repeatedly stabbed at the public toilet blocks near his Narrabeen home late on Saturday, but was found across the road on a bench at a bus stop.

He died at the North Shore hospital, after telling ambulance officers the man who stabbed him was called Chris.

Television personality James Matheson was one of hundreds of friends at the funeral.

"The hardest thing for everyone is the gap between how he lived and how he died," he said.

"The distance is so extreme and just so unbelievable. He was just a gentle soul who never raised his voice. He didn't have an aggressive bone in his body. It's unfathomable that a guy like that could be killed through a violent act."

On the day they buried Fleming, workmen scrubbed blood from the heavily graffitied toilets behind the Tram Shed's bus stop on the main drag of the Narrabeen peninsula.

The area is a hangout for The Lads -- a self-styled post-Cronulla gang of street patriots who wear white baseball caps.

The toilets back on to a basketball court and the Narrabeen lake. The area is often littered with syringes and has been a constant concern to residents and shopkeepers.

The gang has hardly been seen in the area since the murder.

A local resident said that she, like many, did not think they were capable of killing.

"They're basically good kids with bugger-all to do," she said.

A neighbour, Michelle Clendinning, told The Weekend Australian she heard kicking and banging in the toilets about 11pm the night Fleming died. She had turned off the television because of an electrical storm.

She and her daughter heard two young men arguing and some shouting, and now they wonder if the banging noises they heard were from a man so frightened he couldn't call for help.

Police say they have CCTV images of a man in a hooded jacket, but refuse to speculate about the murder.

A Sydney gay newspaper reported an anonymous source claiming that a man who resembled Fleming was a regular at gay beats but friends of the victim strongly discounted this.

"We need to work out why Gerard was out on the street at that time of night, whether anything he might have done might have provoked somebody, or could he simply have been selected," Detective Inspector Russell Oxford said.

Fleming was the youngest of four children. His elderly mother, Margaret, did not speak at the funeral but the celebrant, Father Peter Wieneke, said she told him: "I feel no malice to whoever did this to Gerard, I feel only pity."

His father, Tadgh, is wheelchair-bound and frail. He sat at the front of the church during the service, and wept.

Friend Anthony Rogers said Fleming was a "navigator with a Rainman-like sense of direction".

He loved to travel and had even gone to Rome for Christian World Youth Day in 2000.

Once a group of friends camped at The Basin, a site accessible only by ferry, but Fleming apparently showed up dripping wet at 1am. He had trekked 7km through the bush and swum across a river to join them.

He was described as highly intelligent, with a mind for detail. He once had a low-paid data entry job on computers and devised a program that made it look as though he was working when he wasn't. When the boss complained, he asked them what they expected for $2 an hour.

He played the organ and was loved by those who knew him, but some said he could be taken the wrong way.

It's too bad we'll never know if the autistic guy was homosexual or not. But nonetheless having a strange man drop trou in front of you in a men's room is off-putting to say the least. This stuff about "gay panic" assumes that gay sex has some universal male appeal. Clearly it doesn't.

It doesn't really matter if he was gay or not. Even if everything the boy said was true, his first action would have been to run away, not to kill the guy.

I mean, put yourself in that situation. If some older guy comes out of the stall in his underwear and you feel threatened, is your first instinct to grab your knife and stab him repeatedly? If I was in that situation, my first instinct would be to get out of there.

Even if the guy grabbed him and wouldn't let go, a single stab would have been good enough. By his own testimony, the older guy had his pants around his ankles. How fast can a guy chase you with his pants around his ankles?

The boy is guilty of murder and there was no self defense except on the part of the autistic guy.

Was the austistic guy not responsible for his actions AT ALL?

Yes, but the punishment for being born gay is not death in most modern cultures.

I disagree. Do you think females have more or less reason to fear being raped by a heterosexual male than a heterosexual male has to fear being raped by a homosexual? Check the statistics. If females overcome the panic arising from rape fears in their every day life, where many receive unwanted advances routinely, then males (whose grounds for fearing they are going to rape become victims are far less likely to manifest as reality) can do the same.

We would not accept females killing every male who made untoward sexual advances on them because of some alleged 'rape panic', so I figure, if females can hack unwanted advances from males without panicking and killing someone, males are capable of doing the same.

The entire situation seems very very shady. After dark, a bad neighbourhood, mentoin of a street gang. Murder is never a happy incident, and it sounds like the events which led up to the stabbing were pretty dodgy as well. But if this Fleming character was a gay guy on the DL whose after dark tryst just went bad? No one is ever going to know what really happened.

For a person to fear impending rape is not unnatural. No one welcomes it. In a situation like that, some guys would get angry and combative.

Um, the teenager was drinking liquor after dark with another man in a public restroom known for attracting gay men to perform sex acts on each other?
Because it was raining?

Too bad we'll never know the whole story....

For the purposes of deciding guilt or innocence, it does not matter whether or not homosexual advances were made. Assuming they were, this does not exonerate someone from killing the person making the advance.

I understand it is not an unnatural fear. I also understand it is a more realistic fear for women (since they are more likely to be victims). Many women, including some who have been raped become angry and combative when heterosexual males make sexual advances towards them. Although none of these women welcome being raped, most of them refrain from murdering the person making the advance. This is true even for those women who suffer post traumatic stress disorder with dissociative episodes as a result of actually having been a rape victim.

Being angry and combative may dispose someone toward violent intent; it does not require they act on that intent. If a female accompanied a male to the toilets for a beer and stabbed him repeatedly (fatally), before leaving him to bleed to death, then claimed she did it because he had his pants around his knees, I'd be very surprised if people were anything other than incredulous. Why would someone so fearful have accompanied the individual to such a location? Why did the fearful party not feel they could outrun someone who had their pants around their knees?

I cannot help but think that the homosexuality (rather than fear of rape arising from a sexual advance) is potentially the issue, or maybe it's a standard whereby experiences females are expected to just put up with ,are considered unacceptable to the point of justifying murder if they occur for a male?

Women routinely negotiate unwanted advances from males who usually have a clear physical strength advantage over them. Some of these women have been raped and do have extreme panic reactions to such advances, but we do not hear of huge numbers of them murdering anyone. I do not think males are so much more fearful/panicky than females, or have more cause to fear they will be a rape victim than females, that it is reasonable to suggest 'the gay guy made a pass at me' ought to be some kind of 'get out of jail (despite committing murder) free' card.

Homosexual males are as entitled to life as anyone else (the same is true of homosexual females). They have no more obligation to refrain from seeking sexual/romantic encounters than anyone else. If we accept that it is acceptable to attack and seriously injure or kill a homosexual male because they do what people routinely do (attempt to communicate sexual interest), then we have, in effect, called an 'open season' on homosexual men. I find that completely unacceptable.

Many women routinely control their not unnatural 'fear-of-rape panic', so I see no reason to not expect the same of men, especially when the alternative is 'open season' on anyone who dares make sexual advances on males. There is no 'open season' on heterosexual males who make advances on females, nor on heterosexual females making advances on males. The notion that we can kill gay people with impunity simply by after-the-fact claims that we panicked from some fear of rape, is repugnant in the extreme.