Puerto Rican officials are investigating the murder of an unidentified man found stabbed to death in a motel in Ponce, according to a post today on the Boy in Bushwick blog.
Just about a month after gay teen Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado was murdered, dismembered and set on fire in Caguas, Puerto Rico, the unidentified man’s nude body was found inside a room at Motel Las Colinas in Ponce on wednesday, Dec. 16. Police said the man’s throat had been slashed, and he had been stabbed about 20 times in other parts of his body, injuries apparently incurred as he tried to defend himself.
Boy in Bushwick reports that the man, believed to be gay and between 40 and 45 years old, had checked into the motel the day before with a second man. The second man, also unidentified, left the hotel about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Puerto Rican gay activist Pedro Julio Serrano has called on police to treat the murder as an anti-gay hate crime. In a statement released to the Spanish-speaking media on Thursday, Serrano said: “Through the particular circumstances of his arrival at the motel with another man, the brutality of his murder, the hate with which [the second man allegedly] committed it and through clear signs of cruelty, we ask the authorities to investigate the hate angle in this case.”
