Ten miles outside of Tyler, Texas, on this date in 1993, Nicholas West, 23, (sometimes misspelled Nicolas West in news reports), an adopted man born in Chile whose adoptive parents are said to have refused to accept his homosexuality, was beaten, taunted, and then shot to death after being kidnapped and robbed by three men who bragged to police about killing Mr. West. Henry Earl Dunn, Jr., 19, Donald Loren Aldrich, 29, and David McMillan, 17, kidnapped Mr. West from a Montgomery Ward parking lot in Tyler, Texas, after luring him from Bergfeld Park, and then drove to a clay pit where they fatally shot Mr. West about 15 times. His murder galvanized the Texas gay community leading Tyler, Texas to have its first gay/lesbian protest rally about six weeks after the homophobia-fueled murder. In a videotaped confession Dunn said Mr. West had been kidnapped and shot because he was "queer"; the three perpetrators had purposefully set out to gay-bash the night of Mr. Dunn's slaying. All three men were found guilty of their anti-gay-based crimes; Aldrich and Dunn were given the death penalty and McMillan received a sentence of life in prison. On September 7, 1995, Henry Earl Dunn, Jr., 21, who was African-American, was sentenced to death for the capital murder of Mr. West; Dunn was executed on February 6, 2003, at the age of 28. Aldrich, 39, who was white, was executed on October 12, 2004. On December 1, 2010, a plaque was unveiled in Bergfeld Park honoring the memory of Nicholas West.

At the Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, on this date in 2010, a white man residing in an almost exclusively white town, Mark Zacharias, 54, of Ellettsville, Indiana, who at the time was an Indiana University employee, allegedly threw a rock that shattered the glass of an information board at Goodbody Hall, which houses the school's Jewish studies program. This was one of four anti-Jewish vandal attacks at the university from November 23 through December 1, 2010. Zacharias, a white man who was employed as a scholarship coordinator at the university's Hutton Honors College since the fall of 2003, turned himself in to the Monroe County Jail on December 17, 2010, and he was charged with one count of institutional vandalism and/or one count of felony criminal mischief. Hate crime charges could not be filed against him, because Indiana had no hate crime law at the time. Mark Zacharias, who was placed on paid administrative leave on December 9, 2010, was subsequently fired by the university on December 21, 2010. It is not uncommon for residents of predominently white towns to be charged with hate crimes (regardless of the bias motivation for the hate crime) or to be involved in bias-motivated criminal activity; and, as of the 2000 U.S. Census Ellettsville, Indiana, was 95.83% White, and only 1.22% Black or African-American, 0.18% Native American, 0.73% Asian, and 1.18% Hispanic or Latino of any race.

On this date in 2010 in Bellevue, Washington, a homeless Muslim man, Mustaf A. Abdille, 23, who had recently travelled to Washington state from Nebraska where he had lived, allegedly attacked a man on a King County Metro bus and hurled an anti-gay slur at the man who was wearing nail polish and carrying a purse. Abdille, who was arrested and charged with malicious harassment (a hate crime), told his jailers following his arrest, "In my country, we kill faggots," and "I'm going to (sic) suicide, and everybody is going down with me; I'm not going alone." Mustaf Abdille's arraignment date was scheduled for December 22, 2010.