Killed in Broad Daylight

Clayton Pettus used to spend Sunday afternoons with his coworker and friend. The pair would people-watch from the second floor of the Sacramento gay bar Badlands, where they could look down and take in the dancing crowd below them. That setup might seem tailor-made for two gay guys to dish, but Pettus says Singh never talked smack about anyone.

“He was such a good guy,” Pettus says. “He never had a negative thing to say.”

Pettus remembers Singh as being very closeted when they first met, even telling people he was bisexual. But as he became more comfortable with his surroundings, Pettus says, “I really got to see him blossom.”

A few years ago, Pettus says, Singh showed up at a local pride celebration with his dog, whom he’d costumed for the occasion. Pettus remarked that the dog looked like Paris Hilton, and Singh embraced the idea. “He absolutely owned it,” Pettus says. “That’s what I loved most about him—own what you are and work with it, rather than work against it.”

On the first Sunday in July, however, Singh didn’t go out with Pettus. Instead he went with a different group of friends to a picnic. Four days later he was dead.

When they learned what had happened to Singh, Marghe Covino and Jerry Sloan saw their worst fears coming true. Covino, a longtime lesbian activist in Sacramento, and Sloan, a Metropolitan Community Church minister who cofounded the city’s LGBT Lambda Community Center, had been warning people in the diverse and progressive state capital that nearby evangelical churches were ratchetting up their antigay rhetoric. Some area churches that serve relatively new immigrants from former Soviet republics had over the past couple of years organized a series of increasingly hostile demonstrations to protest local LGBT events, going so far as to threaten and spit on pride festival revelers and gay political rally participants.

“I told people about what I was beginning to see,” Covino says. “It hadn’t popped up on the radar yet. Everybody said I was a Cassandra. Now everyone is running for the hills. It’s typical of our community -- we are reactive as opposed to proactive.”

What made people react was what happened to Singh. While he was picnicking with six straight friends at a local state park, a group at a nearby table who were said to be speaking Russian allegedly singled out Singh -- who like the rest of his group was a Fijian of Indian descent -- and began hurling religious, racial, and antigay epithets. The rhetoric escalated once the Russian speakers sent home the women and children in their group and summoned more men, who prevented Singh’s party from leaving the park. According to local newspaper The Sacramento Bee, county homicide investigators say one of the men, Andrey Vusik, punched Singh, hitting him so hard he fell down and smashed his head. Vusik and his friends got away; an unconscious Singh was rushed to the hospital.

As soon as Covino heard about Singh, she went to the hospital, where his friends and family were sitting vigil. When they filled her in on some of the details, Covino made a connection: “The use of some of the terms gave me the idea that it was not just Slavic people but religious people, because they were calling them ‘sodomites.’ ”

Though he’d taken just one punch, major damage had been done; Singh never regained consciousness and died four days later after he was pronounced brain-dead and removed from life support. He was 26. Vusik, charged with involuntary manslaughter, is currently a fugitive from justice and is thought to be in Russia; in mid October a 21-year-old associate of Vusik’s, Aleksandr Shevchenko, pleaded not guilty in Sacramento superior court to hate-crime charges related to Singh’s death. A preliminary hearing for Shevchenko is scheduled for late November, the Bee reported.

Covino wasn’t the only one keeping vigil who didn’t know Singh personally. She and members of Asian and Pacific Islander community groups, as well as area Muslims and Sikhs, quickly formed the Satendar Justice Coalition to ensure that city residents and law enforcement officials recognize Singh’s death as a hate crime and take measures to prevent further such tragedies. The coalition also helped raise money to send Singh’s body back to his parents in Fiji and organize a memorial.

“We’ve been coasting along here,” Sloan says, noting that LGBT people have long been integrated politically and socially into larger Sacramento life and that until recently, protesters at gay events had been small, disorganized groups. That changed in 2006, when hundreds of Slavic evangelicals showed up at Queer Youth Advocacy Day, a lobbying initiative that brings LGBT students to Sacramento to meet with state legislators.

“Prior to that, they would be lucky if they had 75 people at a rally,” Sloan explains. “Now they get [up to] 500 Russians down there. It’s crazy.”