Murder of Sakia Gunn

Sakia Gunn was a 15-year-old African American lesbian living in Newark, New Jersey. On the night of May 11, 2003, she was returning home from a night out with friends and her cousin in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. While waiting for a New Jersey Transit bus at the corner of Broad and Market Streets in downtown Newark, Gunn and her friends were propositioned by two men. The girls rejected the men's advances and declared themselves to be lesbians. The men then attacked the group. Gunn fought back, and one of the men, Richard McCullough, stabbed her in the chest. Both men fled the scene in their vehicle immediately afterward.

Gunn's cousin, Valencia Bailey, flagged down a passing driver, who took Gunn to nearby University Hospital. Gunn died in the arms of Valencia Bailey in the hospital parking lot.

Richard McCullough turned himself in to authorities several days after the killing and was arrested in connection with the crime on May 16, 2003. As part of a plea bargain, murder charges against him were dropped. On March 3, 2005, McCullough pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter, aggravated assault, and bias intimidation. He had at one point claimed that Gunn died after she "ran into his knife," a claim described as a lie. On April 21, 2005, McCullough was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released from prison on May 13, 2020.

Gunn's death was deemed a hate crime and drew a two-day series in The Washington Post in October 2004, written by Anne Hull, who spent months reporting on the lives of young lesbians in Newark following the killing; the series was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. A comparison of media coverage, using the LexisNexis database and conducted by a professor at The College of New Jersey, found that major newspapers ran far fewer stories about Gunn's death than about the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, and noted that it took nearly seven months for Gunn's attacker to be indicted.

Gunn's death prompted outrage from Newark's gay and lesbian community, which, together with GLAAD, called on the mayor's office to establish a gay and lesbian community center, increase police patrols near Newark Penn Station/Broad Street, create an LGBT advisory council, and hold the school board accountable for its handling of the aftermath at Westside High School, which Gunn had attended. The Newark Pride Alliance, an LGBT advocacy group, was founded in the wake of her murder.

Gunn has since been commemorated in multiple ways: a 2008 documentary, Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project; a 2016 mural in Newark; a posthumous Pride of Essex County Award in 2023; the 2023 renaming of Newark's Academy Street to Sakia Gunn Way; and her 2024 induction into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall Inn in New York City.