April 27, 2008
Man Doused With Gas, Burned at Polo Grounds
Police are investigating the suspected robbery of a 26-year-old man who was found naked and badly burned in the lobby of a Polo Grounds building at 8th Ave. and 155th St. in Manhattan. Trevor Lyons' clothes were found on the 16th floor of the building, where it appears he was attacked at about 8 a.m. Saturday morning.
Lyons was attending what the Daily News described as a "drug-fueled party" in the building. He is not a resident of the building where he was burned, but lives with his mother in the nearby Rangel Houses. A neighbor described him as a lovable person.
FDNY investigators believe that someone doused Lyons with gasoline and used a match to start the fire. Police suspect the motive for the attack was robbery, but are still investigating the circumstances of the incident. A homeless man was attacked in East Harlem last year with a towel soaked in gasoline that was then lit on fire. Police initially suspected teenagers, but the culprit turned out to be a Bronx man whose own father was homeless.
Image from NYC - Harlem: Polo Grounds Towers, by wallyg at flickr
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They're our own little slice of Rwanda, Congo, Zimbabwe, and Haiti with their little warlords and little war crimes.
Get all the Projects off the taxpayer's roll and put them out into the market and let the good tenants and bad tenants sort themselves out.
Please no racist comments here. People from the third world countries need affordable housing. Unfortunately they chose America to find that affordable housing.
A "drug-fueled" party hmmm? Too bad the cops didn't raid it and shoot it up with all those sub-machine guns they now tote.
Where's Al Sharpton?
I'm going to go out on a limb and call hate crime on this. In the linked article, Lyons is described as a homosexual who visited the Polo Grounds Towers often. The humiliating circumstances of his discovery (i.e. naked in the lobby), the predictability of his appearance there (he apparently went to parties at the bldg. with his boyfriend frequently), and the oddness of the method of attack (who has gasoline on the 16th Fl of a housing project?) screams pre-meditation to me. I'm betting this will shake out as an anti-gay crime.
Where's the hipsters? How could this Burning Man Festival go unnoticed?
I agree with Dave Hogarty. I don't even get why people are interested in a stranger's sexuality. But I know that when they are, they too often respond with hate and violence.