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A man who'd just finished his bartending shift sustained a skull fracture, in another attack in a spate occurring in the Oak Lawn neighborhood.
There's been yet another attack in Dallas's gayborhood of Oak Lawn, this one leaving the victim hospitalized with a skull fracture.
Geoffrey Hubbard, a gay man who works as a bartender at the Cedar Springs Tap House, had left work and was walking to a friend's house shortly after 11 p.m. Thursday when he tried to go around a man on the sidewalk, but theman hit him on the head with an as-yet unidentified object and started going through his pockets, Dallas TV station WFAA reports.
"He grabbed my pocket and was trying to grab my wallet and I kicked him off and just yelled for help," Hubbard (pictured above) told the station by phone from Baylor University Medical Center this morning. Hubbard then rolled underneath a parked SUV and waited there until an off-duty police officer who was driving through the neighborhood found and assisted him.
Hubbard had a temporal bone fracture and required stitches to his head. He was in the medical center's intensive care unit and expected to remain hospitalized for a few days, he told WFAA.
The heavily gay area, with nightlife centered on Cedar Springs Road, has been the site of about a dozen attacks on gay men in the past three months. Just one has been classified as a hate crime -- an incident in which a man was attacked with a baseball bat by assailants who used antigay slurs. Area residents have held community meetings and rallies on the crime problem, and police have increased their patrols in the neighborhood and plan to install cameras there.
But the attack on Hubbard, followed by another couple of robberies in the area last night, is "like a bunch of cold water -- it's a such a shock," Rafael McDonnell of the Resource Center, Dallas's LGBT community center, told The Dallas Morning News.
"Why do the criminals always seem to be one step ahead?" he said. "Is there something else we should be doing?"
In the meantime, he advised those who live, work, or patronize businesses in the area to help take care of each other. In addition to police work to prevent crime, "some of it also is this shared responsibility to make sure that not only you make it home safe, but that the guy you were walking with a block or two ago is safe," McDonnell told the Morning News. "We are our brothers' and sisters' keepers."
Watch the WFAA report below.
