Dozens gather to remember shootings at Backstreet Cafe – Roanoke.com

Thanks to my friend Kirk for reminding me of this…

As long as hatred if officially sanctioned, we run the risk of a repeat…

Whenever Dee Reese hears that front door swing open and the sound of the bells rattling against the back, she turns to examine whoever is walking into the Backstreet Cafe in downtown Roanoke.

It’s been that way since Sept. 22, 2000, when troubled drifter and Vietnam War veteran Ronald Gay vowed to “waste some faggots” and found his way into the Salem Avenue nightspot. He opened fire, killing Danny Lee Overstreet, 43, and wounding six others.

Reese, a Backstreet regular, remembers clenching a barstool’s metal legs, keeping the black leather seat cushion pressed to her head as a shield against the fusillade of bullets.

“A lot of people withdrew after that,” said Reese, who is a lesbian. “I am more cautious of my surroundings now, but I am not ashamed to be who I am.”

Wednesday night, about 60 people gathered at the bar to remember Overstreet and the others who were shot there 10 years ago. The crowd included blacks, whites, Asians, lesbians, gay men, preachers, some who were there that night and many who were not. None of the victims was in attendance.

Gay, serving four back-to-back life sentences, wrote from the Marion Correctional Center last month that he didn’t select his victims because of his name, as he told police shortly after the crime. Instead, he said, he killed “the homosexual” in an attempt to silence “the evil” in his head that was telling him “to shoot or have no rest.”

via Dozens gather to remember shootings at Backstreet Cafe – Roanoke.com.