Frat boys allegedly beat gay man late at night in Texas while shouting slur

A gay man in Austin, Texas, was walking to his Uber late at night when a group of men suddenly assaulted him, shouting an anti-gay slur at him. The alleged victim, Joshua Ybarra, was wearing a purse and black-heeled boots.

“I feel like they should all be charged accordingly. I mean, it was just one person who started the whole thing, but they all followed suit, especially when I was getting beat; the slurs were coming,” Ybarra said to KXAN.

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“We’re resilient,” one Pride group member said of the attacks. “No matter what the cost is, we’re not going to back down.”

The phrase “gay f*g” was shouted at Ybarra as he was beaten and punched until he blacked out on the ground.

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One of Ybarra’s friends attempted to shield him; however, this only led to her facing attacks.

“She threw her body over me, and I just remember seeing them punch the back of her head,” Ybarra said. “I was just screaming at her and saying, ‘You need to move.’”

The Austin Police Department believes that this incident was a hate crime.

Three University of Texas Delta Sigma Phi fraternity members – Alex Saenz and Bhavya Kaushik – and the vice president of the Eta Chapter of Delta Sigma Phi, Sergio Martinez, were arrested following the attack after they turned themselves in, with a warrant out for an additional woman who was believed to have participated in the attack.

The attorneys for the men said a friend of Ybarra initiated the attack. The attorneys also claim there’s evidence that will exonerate their clients and that other security footage backs their clients’ claims. 

The attorney of Saenz, who is the only one charged with a hate crime, insists that he did not say the slur.

In Texas, it is notoriously hard to prosecute crimes as hate crimes. Of the over 6,000 hate crimes that have been listed by the state’s police as occurring since 2001, only 41 have actually been charged as hate crimes, and the majority of them don’t even make it to court as prosecutors rarely pursue hate crime charges.

Activists and lawmakers have tried to combat this lack of enforcement.

“Where you live determines [whether] you’re going to get the help that you need. So, for a lot of rural and suburban LGBTQ Texans, oftentimes, there is really no recourse locally for folks to have these crimes taken seriously,” Equality Texas Executive Director Ricardo Martinez said to KXAN. “We need lawmakers to have the courage to stand up and do something meaningful to protect our community because violence, like what happened to Josh, falls squarely on their heads.”

Ybarra has not yet been cleared to go back to work after the attack.

In spite of the attack, he’s still seeking inspiration. There’s a drawing his niece drew on that’s framed, which quotes poet Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To be yourself in a world constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

Ybarra said, “It’s funny because I always look at that, and I’m trying to remind myself to be my true, authentic self regardless of everything that has happened.”

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