D.C. man pleads guilty in anti-gay assault

A D.C. man pleaded guilty Feb. 3 to assaulting and threatening a group of women with a knife in Adams Morgan during an incident that police listed as an anti-gay bias crime.

Christopher McDonald, who is scheduled to be sentenced April 5, approached five women who were eating pizza in public last September and singled out one of the women for being “dressed as a man,” according to an arrest affidavit.

After the woman responded that she was “comfortable” dressing the way she was, McDonald said that “in Jamaica, I’d shoot you in the mouth if you were gay,” the affidavit quotes a witness as saying. It says McDonald then produced a “black handled knife with a shiny steel blade” and approached the woman from behind. The other women shouted, “He’s got a knife,” prompting McDonald to further “confront” the first woman, says the affidavit.

“She thought [McDonald] was going to stab her and was in fear for her life,” says the affidavit.

It says McDonald and a man accompanying him then fled the area. He was later arrested at a nearby location after police recovered the knife from a car he was occupying, the affidavit says.