Every year, the day sneaks on up Judy Shepard to deliver its sucker
punch from the past: The 12th of October. The day Matthew died.
"It hits you and you say to yourself: Oh, this is the day," she says. "This is why I feel so terrible."
Fifteen years ago this week, gay college student Matthew Shepard
was pistol-whipped and left for dead: unconscious, barely alive, lashed
to a jagged wooden fence outside this small prairie city by two men
disgusted by his homosexuality. A passerby mistook the diminutive,
105-pound Shepard for a scarecrow — a forlorn and unthinkable image that
still haunts a generation of Americans.
Judy Shepard refuses to
associate her son with that image or with the date that he died, six
days after the attack. Instead, she summons memories of her eldest boy
on Dec. 1, his birthday, celebrating his love for politics, languages
and the spectacle of the musical "The Phantom of the Opera."
Read on...
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