Local
Police expect arrests soon in shooting of gay man
3 incidents of anti-LGBT violence in 2 days said to be unrelated
Assistant Police Chief Peter Newsham (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
A D.C. police official said on Thursday that an investigation into the March 11 shooting of a gay man at a Columbia Heights restaurant, which police listed as a hate crime, is “progressing very well” and an arrest in the case is expected soon.
At a news conference outside police headquarters, Assistant Police Chief Peter Newsham, who heads the department’s Investigational Services Bureau, said the severe beating and robbery of a gay man and an assault that knocked a transgender woman unconscious one day later were unrelated to the shooting incident.
Newsham said the March 12 beating and robbery incident at Georgia Avenue and Irving Street, N.W., in which a 29-year-old gay man was hospitalized with a broken jaw and head injuries, is listed as an anti-gay hate crime. But he said no evidence could be found to classify the March 12 assault against the transgender woman at West Virginia Avenue and Mt. Olivet Road, N.E., as an anti-trans hate crime.
“It’s unclear what the motive was,” he said of the transgender assault, which resulted in the woman being hospitalized, according to a police report.
“It’s unfortunate that we’ve had members of this community that have been the victims,” said Newsham, when asked if the LGBT community was being targeted.
“The only thing I can really point out to people is that they don’t appear to be related. So it doesn’t appear to be a group of folks that’s targeting or a specific group of people that’s targeting this community,” he said.
Police have said the shooting incident, involving a 31-year-old gay male victim, began after the victim and at least three suspects in the case got into an argument that escalated into a physical altercation.
A witness who identified himself as the victim’s cousin said he, the victim and another cousin were sitting at a table at the International House of Pancakes restaurant on 14th Street, N.W. in Columbia Heights when he overheard the suspect and two people seated with him refer to the people sitting at the victim’s table as “faggies.”
The cousin told the Blade the altercation began when the victim got up to pay the restaurant bill and the suspect and the two people with him blocked his path, prompting him to push his way past the three people. Witnesses heard a gunshot during the scuffle that broke out between the parties, and the victim quickly discovered he had been hit, a police report says.
He was taken to a hospital and remains under treatment for what Newsham said was a non-life threatening injury. The cousin said the gunshot wound injured the victim’s liver.
“The investigation into that case is progressing very well at this point in time,” Newsham said at the news conference. “Investigators have been working on it since the incident occurred and we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to bring that matter to closure.”
Asked if any of the incidents were captured by video cameras that police and private businesses often install on utility poles, Newsham said, “We will not be releasing video at this time…We do have video in a couple of the cases but we don’t feel we need any help with the video at this time,” he said. “We’ve identified most of the people that were involved.”
Jeffrey Richardson, director of the Mayor’s Office of GLBT Affairs, who accompanied Newsham at the news conference, said his office was working closely with police officials to combat hate crimes against all groups.
“We begin to think about the broader implications of why these things are happening,” Richardson said. “We continue to work very closely with community groups and to think about what type of outreach we can do to really begin some culture shifting work around some of these issues.”
Richardson’s comments came after Mayor Vincent Gray issued his own statement denouncing the three incidents of violence against members of the LGBT community.
“All crime is horrific and destructive to the fabric of our community, but especially violent behavior that targets people because of their ethnic background, sexual orientation, faith or other identifying characteristics,”Gray said.
“These kinds of crimes are particularly insidious, because they are designed to instill fear in an entire community,” he said. “This cannot and will not stand in the District of Columbia, where all of our residents have the right to walk the streets of our neighborhoods free of fear, regardless of their identities, beliefs or characteristics. The Metropolitan Police Department and I will not rest until the perpetrators of these brutal crimes are arrested, tried and safely locked away.”
Gay D.C. Council member Jim Graham, a Democrat representing Ward 1, where the shooting and beating-robbery took place, said he was closely monitoring the police investigation into the incidents.
“Such crimes clearly will not be tolerated. And we are all agreed on that,” Graham said in a statement. “As to the shooting inside IHOP at 6:30 AM, the video camera footage has been obtained, and police are confident of a closure on this.”
Graham said police officials told him an off-duty D.C. police detective had been eating at the IHOP at the time of the incident and intervened immediately, a development that provides police with an important advantage in their investigation of the incident.
Gay activist Peter Rosenstein, president of the Campaign For All D.C. Families, which advocated for the city’s same-sex marriage law, praised Gray and Graham for denouncing the latest incidents of violence against GLBT people but expressed concern that other elected officials had yet to speak out on the incidents.
“While DC has taken great steps forward in areas such as marriage-equality, we are still seeing too much violence against the LGBT community,” he said. “We must demand that our elected Council members and the mayor speak out and work to educate people to prevent these crimes in the future. The punishment for these crimes needs to be swift and severe and people need to know there will be major repercussions for this senseless violence against our community.”
The 2025 Silver Pride Resource Fair and Tea Dance was held at the Eaton Hotel on Wednesday, May 21.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
District of Columbia
Sinners and Saints bar vandalized in suspected anti-LGBTQ hate crime
Blade spoke with General Manager Blair Nixon after incident
On Thursday, shattered glass, broken doors, and homophobic slurs were discovered in the entryway of Adams Morgan queer bar Sinners and Saints (2309 18th St. N.W.) Images of the destruction were posted to the bar’s Instagram, and news of the break-in began to spread.
The Washington Blade sat down with one of the co-partners and general manager of Sinners and Saints, Blair Nixon, to discuss the break-in and the overwhelming response from the LGBTQ community.
“Our door was broken-so the glass was shattered,” Nixon told the Blade when describing the damage done to the space. “They wrote a slur on our wall, and unfortunately-we’re not sure to the extent that it was, but there’s a bunch of inventory missing from our liquor closet. It does seem like it was targeted because of what they wrote on the wall.”
Nixon, who has been with Washington’s only QTBIPOC (queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color) bar since its opening last August, explained that upon learning of the break-in, fear was his first reaction.
“It was really scary,” Nixon said. “To know that somebody was in our space, vandalizing it-it was very scary and honestly, devastating.”
He went on to say that if it weren’t for the restaurant above Sinners and Saints, La Grotta, they wouldn’t have known until hours later.
“We found out because of the restaurant upstairs that we’re partnered with,” he said. “The electricity to the entire building was turned off-including apartments and the restaurant above us. Whoever broke in went into the closet that’s outside of the building and turned the electricity off to the entire building. When the restaurant owners got there, they tried to figure out why there wasn’t any electricity. They went downstairs and saw the shattered glass, the door broken, and the slur on the wall.”
Once Sinners and Saints staff arrived to survey the damage, they posted the images to their Instagram and called the Metropolitan Police Department. Nixon was grateful for both MPD and the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs’s quick reaction.
“We were really happy with the response,” Nixon said. “The mayor’s office reached out relatively quickly, and I had a conversation with them, and the police came shortly afterwards, and they did a really good job. So we’re very appreciative of the response. They took a statement, they looked at the damage, took photos of everything, and made a report.”
“They actually sent, like, the entire department,” he added. “There were multiple police officers, multiple detectives, and the LGBTQ liaison came a little bit later. In general, I just really appreciated the response overall.”
The Blade obtained a copy of the filed police report, which described the break-in as a felony-more specifically, MPD considered it a second-degree burglary. MPD’s report also classified the break-in and subsequent graffiti as having “a hate bias or motivation” against sexual minorities who own and frequent the bar.
Unfortunately, there were no cameras on the premises at the time of the break-in, which MPD estimates happened sometime between 2-6 p.m., but Sinners and Saints were able to obtain footage from nearby businesses.
“We did have some camera footage from the hostel next door, and we submitted that to law enforcement,” he said. “We’re just going to let them do their investigation, and I don’t want to make any suppositions about what might have happened.”
When asked what he believed motivated the assailant(s), Nixon didn’t offer a definitive answer. He suggested it was likely someone hostile to LGBTQ businesses in Washington but assured the Blade that Sinners and Saints would not back down-and that the LGBTQ community stands firmly behind them.
“I don’t want to make any statements about what we think happened. We’re going to let the police do their job. But, as the only QTBIPOC bar in D.C., I think it’s important to note that we’re still here. We’re not going to close. We appreciate the support of our community, and I think that overall, it’s really important that we’re a safe space for the underserved and marginalized communities in D.C. Given that D.C. has, you know, one of the largest queer populations-but there aren’t very many spaces for the communities that we serve-we’re very proud to serve those communities. And we aren’t going to stop.”
Nixon had one critique for MPD, but was overall with their quick response.
“We hope that law enforcement would have a greater presence in Adams Morgan,” he said. “I think that, especially from talking to other establishment owners and bar owners, there’s definitely been some increased issues in Adams Morgan, and we hope that that doesn’t continue. We talked to the Mayor’s Office about it and to the police when they came-to have a greater presence in Adams Morgan.”
Since its opening, Nixon said the support from the QTBIPOC and broader LGBTQ community felt strong-but now, after the break-in, that connection has only grown stronger.
“We opened in August of last year, and we think that D.C. in general has really responded to our mission, and the community has really shown up for us-just like the same way that we’ve shown up for them.”
That community support for Sinners and Saints, Nixon said, extends past the diverse group of QTBIPOC people buying shots and tipping 20 percent nightly. Some of the city’s LGBTQ organizations showed up, offering to help. One of those community members who reached out owns a popular gay bar just up 18th Street.
“The response has been really strong, and we definitely appreciate the support. A few of the other LGBT bar owners in Adams Morgan actually stopped by in person. We really appreciated that Dave Perruzza from Pitchers came by, and just in general that the community has been rallying around us.”
On Thursday night, Sinners and Saints opened as planned and hosted their “Sapphic Sailor Moon” party. Despite the break-in, the LGBTQ community came out to support them.
“I was working-actually bartending,” Nixon said. “I wasn’t originally supposed to be working, but I thought it was important for all the partners to be there. So everyone that’s involved in Sinners and Saints’ leadership team came out. Obviously, we were dealing with the incident, but being there the entire night, we thought that the response from the community was really strong. We wanted to make sure that we posted on social media the fact that we were still open, because a lot of people were contacting us and asking if we were going to be continuing on, if we were going to close. We thought it was really important to make sure that we were there and still open and still available.”
That community, Nixon said, includes members of the LGBTQ population who are often overlooked-which makes the attack on a space intentionally dedicated to them-particularly trans people and people of color-even more painful.
“I think that DC in general, as one of the cities with the biggest queer populations, has adopted the LGBT community in general-and it’s great. However, the adoption of people of color and the overall QTBIPOC community, you know, our trans community, hasn’t been the same. It’s super important to us to make sure that that community is protected and that there are safe spaces for them, and that’s what our core mission is. We never want that to stop. The most important thing is that the safe space for those marginalized and underrepresented communities continues. And I would hope that the acceptance of the community that we serve continues-and is just as important as the acceptance of the LGBT community as a whole.”
If you have any information about the break in, please contact MPD at (202) 727-9099. Sinners and Saints has set up a GoFundMe page for repairs. It can be accessed here.
District of Columbia
Adams Morgan queer bar broken into and vandalized
Sinners and Saints targeted Thursday night
On Thursday night, Sinners and Saints, a popular queer bar in Adams Morgan and the only QTBIPOC (queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and people of color) bar in D.C., was broken into and vandalized with homophobic slurs, according to a recent Instagram post from the establishment.
“Last night, our bar — the only QTBIPOC bar in DC — was broken into and hate-crimed during DC Black Pride, a time meant for celebration, resilience, and joy — and on the eve of WorldPride 2025. We are heartbroken, but we are not broken,” the post read.
The statement was accompanied by a slideshow showing the damage: the front iron gate door and its glass counterpart shattered, glass strewn across the floor, and the word “FAGGOT” scrawled in black ink on the wall.
“This space exists to protect and celebrate queer and trans BIPOC communities, and this attack only strengthens our resolve,” the post continued. “We will NOT be silenced. We will NOT be intimidated. We will NOT back down.”
“To those who tried to harm us: hate fuels our defiance. To our community: we see you, we love you, and we will continue fighting for you. Sinners and Saints is resistance. We will rebuild. We will STAY OPEN. And we will keep our doors — and hearts — wide open for all who need refuge.”
They ended the message with a call to action: “Stand with us. Share this. Show up. We keep us safe.”
“What happened was truly disheartening, but we won’t be silenced,” co-owner Fazeel Ashraf told the Washington Blade. “QTBIPOC spaces are so important in this current political climate. I’d love to do a phone interview with one of my fellow partners.”
Despite the heartbreak surrounding the break-in and what Ashraf described as “a hate crime,” the LGBTQ community quickly rallied in the comments, offering support and assistance.
“Please let us know how we can help!” wrote Nik Battaglia. “I’m a handy queer with handy queer friends — I can fix shit, paint shit, and am happy to stand guard outside.”
Even national figures chimed in.
“RuPaul’s Drag Race” star Laganja Estranja commented, “Incredible response! I believe in you. Sending so much love and strength.”
The Blade reached out to the Metropolitan Police Department regarding the break-in but has not received a response.
To view the damage, and some of the LGBTQ community’s supportive statements, visit the Sinners and Saints’s Instagram page.
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