Judy Shepard :: A mother speaks

Judy Shepard hates October. The sixth day of that month marks the night her son Matthew was tied to a fence in Laramie, Wyo., and brutally beaten. Within a week, on Oct. 12, 1998, he died of those injuries in a Fort Collins, Colo., hospital, surrounded by family.

Just 21 when he was murdered, Shepard’s death shook a country dealing with GLBT equality as a political issue growing more pressing by the day. Matthew Shepard was not the first -- nor the last -- to be targeted because he was gay. But the circumstances were right for him to become the universal victim of anti-gay violence.

Shepard writes of her son’s HIV infection, his being raped in Morocco on a student trip, and other parts of her son’s life that she might prefer remain private. She also offers bright spots that didn’t make the headlines, like learning that the police officer first on the scene of her son’s attack in Laramie told her that a doe had been sitting in the grass next to Matthew. She writes that she likes to think that doe watched over her son through the night. (Continue Reading-Source/Edge)