Remembering Paul Broussard: Murdered for being Gay

Since the time of Cain killing Abel, depicted in the painting above, humans have found many reasons for murder, none so callous as because the victim was "different."

Seven years before the brutal death of Matthew Shepard, a young man named Paul Broussard was horrifically murdered by 10 teenagers. Broussard had been an Eagle Scout and played the clarinet in the school band and the church choir. He graduated with honors; 15th in a class of 469. He paid his own way through college by working two jobs, and graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in finance.

It was two o'clock in the morning on July 4th, when Broussard and two of his friends left Heaven, one of Houston's gay bars in the Montrose neighborhood. Only blocks away from home, their attackers, who had been drinking and doing drugs, pulled their cars up and asked the three for directions to the bar they had just left. When Broussard and his friends told them where it was, the teens got out of their cars and attacked the gay men with fists, steel-toed boots, nail-studded two-by-fours, and a knife wielded by Jon Buice. Broussard's friends escaped down a busy street, but he unfortunately headed down a dead end street, where he was surrounded by the attackers.

The ten young men were cheering and yelling as they attacked Broussard, who suffered abrasions, puncture wounds, a broken rib, bruised testicles, and three stab woulds. As he lay on the ground, almost unconscious, two of his attackers rifled through his pockets and took a comb as a souvenir. The ten young men then drove off, still cheering and yelling.

Broussard was treated by EMS at the scene, and then airlifted to St. Joseph's Hospital in Houston, where he died eight-and-a-half hours later. Broussard would have most likely survived the beating, but what killed him was the stabbing by attacker Jon Buice.

The ten teens were eventually caught, tried, and convicted, and served various terms. However, Buice received a sentence of 45 years behind bars due to his stabbing of Broussard, and is up for parole in October, having already been denied in 2003 and 2005.

Broussard's mother, Nancy Rodriguez, currently lives in Georgia. She has attended more than 20 parole hearings in her efforts to keep her son's assailants in prison. Says Rodriguez, "we have to start somewhere teaching our children to value people and life. That it is not acceptable to use language like fag, queer, fairy. If Paul’s story has touched the life of even one young person and made them stop and think about their actions, then maybe his death will not have been in vain."