Man’s killing looks like a hate crime, police say

NEW YORK — Mark Carson did not hide that he was gay, and when he went out on the town he would often head to Greenwich Village, where years before he was born, much of the struggle for gay liberation unfolded.

Yet late Friday night, just blocks from the Stonewall Inn, among the most important landmarks of that struggle, he was confronted by a man screaming anti-gay slurs, who then stalked him before pulling out a silver revolver and fatally shooting him, the police said.

“This clearly looks to be a hate crime,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said at a news conference on Saturday.

Kelly described a chaotic scene that involved a man seemingly out looking for trouble when he crossed paths with Carson and ended up shooting him in the face. The violence was quickly followed by a police chase and an arrest on the corner of West Third and Macdougal Streets as scores of bar hoppers looked on in shock. On the rise

Kelly said there had been a rise in bias-related crimes in New York City this year — 22 compared with 13 during the same period last year.

In just the past three weeks, there have been five attacks directed at gay men, including a vicious assault on a gay couple outside Madison Square Garden on May 5.

Timothy Lunceford, 56, who has lived in the West Village for 35 years, said he believed the killing was a brazen display of a kind of intolerance he had not known in New York for decades. “It’s outrageous,” he said. “They say we’ve worked through homophobia, but it’s not gone away. It’s just not usually as out there in the open like it was this morning.”

Carson, 32, had recently moved from Harlem to Brooklyn after scrimping and saving money from his job at a yogurt shop in midtown Manhattan, said Kay Allen, a friend for more than a decade. Outsized spirit

“He was a proud gay man,” Allen said. “A fabulous gay man.” She noted that he loved going to Greenwich Village.

“His spirit was too big for this city,” she said. “He didn’t have a negative bone in his body.”

Elected officials and other civic leaders were quick to condemn the killing.

“There was a time in New York City when two people of the same gender could not walk down the street arm-in-arm without fear of violence and harassment,” said Christine Quinn, the City Council speaker, whose Manhattan district includes Greenwich Village and who hopes to become the city’s first openly gay mayor. “We refuse to go back to that time.”

Detectives were still trying to identify the suspect, an effort complicated because he was carrying several fake IDs at the time of his arrest.