Someone in the neighbourhood had called 911.” I just knew I was covered in blood and in extreme pain, so I just started yelling and screaming. “I remember waking up a little confused, I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. “I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t see anything, I just remember getting hit twice,” he said. Jarret Duke was walking home around midnight one evening last August after finishing his bartending shift. As in the assault on Dominguez, his wallet was not stolen. Two weeks earlier, on 20 September, the same day as the Dallas pride festival, Blake Rasnake was dragged from an Oak Lawn street into a van, beaten with a baseball bat, called a “fag” and dumped out a couple of streets away. And as the weeks and months after his assault would reveal, Dominguez was not the only victim.
But while the “what?” and the “who?” remain mysterious, the “why?” seems clear: the 32-year-old is a gay man who was leaving a gay club in Oak Lawn, Dallas’s main LGBT nightlife district. Nearly seven months later, no witness or footage has emerged that would help Dominguez fill in the blanks, to add detail beyond the memory of tasting blood in his mouth.
