The defendant on trial for fatally shooting a 32-year-old man in Greenwich Village in 2013 has been accused of killing the victim solely because he was gay. But this week, hate crime suspect Elliot Morales, who is defending himself in court, called his transgender ex-lover to the stand to testify on his behalf that he is not homophobic.
"In your experience and personal knowledge, do you believe Elliot Morales is a person who hates gays?" Morales asked the 38-year-old woman, Jane Smith, whose real name was not revealed to the jury and who testified from behind a curtain on the witness stand. "Absolutely not," she responded, according to the Post.
Smith 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. Smith now works at a testing clinic for the LGBT community.
Before she took the stand, the Post reports Morales told Justice Kirke Bartley, out of the earshot of jurors, "I'm not a bigot of any type. I don't hate anyone. Not gays, lesbians, none of that. This is not a hate crime. This was not an intentional murder."
But jurors were also shown footage of Morales in the immediate aftermath of the May 18th, 2013 shooting, in which Morales allegedly confessed to fatally shooting victim Mark Carson on camera and laughed gleefully about it. "I f-king shot him dead!” Morales can be heard saying in the clip to cops while laughing to himself. "Diagnosis dead, doctor!...They don’t teach you that in the academy, right?"
Carson and his friend Danny Robinson, whom Morales cross-examined last week, 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 "fa--ots" 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. Another officer, Henry Huot, saw Morales running and was able to tackle him on West 3rd Street.
Other witnesses testified last week that Morales was running amok earlier in the 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.
According to Officer Michael Morrin, who captured video of Morales laughing when he arrived at the scene, Morales told him, "I shot him dead. He deserved it. He was acting tough in front of his bitch." After he said that, Morrin took out his phone to start recording him. "Officer, does that seem like normal behavior to you?" Morales asked Morrin on the stand last week. "To my standards, no," the cop replied.
Morales has been charged with murder as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon.
