The man who was accused of fatally shooting a 32-year-old man in Greenwich Village in 2013 solely because the victim was gay has been found guilty of a hate crime. After a two-and-a-half week trial, Elliot Morales, 36, was convicted today of murder as a hate crime, menacing a police officer and possession of weapon.
"It was a terrible crime, I think we all felt he had some serious screws loose," one female juror told the NY Post after the verdict was read.
Morales had been acting as his own attorney during the trial for the May 18th, 2013 incident. Carson and his friend Danny Robinson, whom Morales cross-examined on the stand, were walking on West 8th Street that evening when a drunken Morales allegedly initiated hostilities by saying to them, "What are you, gay wrestlers?" and calling them "fag**ts" and "queers."
After a heated exchange, Morales walked around the corner onto Eight Street and the two men followed. Seconds later, Morales allegedly took out a Taurus .38-caliber gun and shot Carson in the head. An officer saw Morales running and was able to tackle him on West 3rd Street.
Witnesses testified that Morales had been running amok earlier that evening before the fatal confrontation, with one local restaurant manager testifying that Morales had urinated on the front window of his restaurant, yelled homophobic slurs at his staff, and threatened a bartender with his gun.
Jurors were shown footage of Morales in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, in which Morales allegedly confessed to fatally shooting victim Mark Carson on camera and laughed gleefully about it. "I fucking shot him dead!" Morales can be heard saying to cops in the clip while laughing to himself. "Diagnosis dead, doctor!...They don't teach you that in the academy, right?"
During the trial, Morales also called his transgender ex-lover to the stand to testify on his behalf that he is not homophobic. The woman testified that she and Morales had a sexual relationship on and off for 10 years after meeting Morales on the web. "I was looking online. My heading was clearly—'transsexual woman looking for a man,'" she told the jury.
In her final summation, the prosecutor argued that Morales is an "angry, small man" whose "deep-seated hatred for gay men" surfaced that night: "Mark Carson was nothing to the defendant but a subhuman fag**t," said prosecutor Shannon Lucey. "It was not alcohol that led him to kill Mark Carson. He was not justified in killing Mark Carson—it was irrational hate."
