Boady Beltz suffered a stab wound that required five stitches, left, when he was attacked near Lower Greenville on Sunday night. At right, Beltz shows the IV he says Presbyterian Hospital staff failed to remove when he was discharged.
Boady Beltz said he was standing on Greenville Avenue near Highway 75 Sunday night, waiting for an Uber driver, when he was assaulted by a man with a knife.
Beltz said he had been drinking at Oak Lawn-area bars and “had gotten pretty wasted” when he asked a friend to drive him home. They left the gayborhood in the friend’s car, but when Beltz realized his friend wasn’t ready to take him home, he asked to be let out of the car at Greenville and 75. He said he had called for an Uber driver and was waiting for the driver when he felt someone shove him from behind.
“I thought it was my friend, that he had come back to get me and take me home,” Beltz said on Tuesday, Jan. 19. “But when I turned around, it was some guy I didn’t know who just lunged at me with a knife.”
Beltz said he put his hand up to guard his face, and the man with the knife stabbed him in the hand, leaving an inch-plus laceration near the base of his thumb.
“I started screaming then, and running, and I ran into a Humperdink’s restaurant that was right there. I was screaming and screaming for someone to help me, and they hid me behind a counter. I remember looking down at my hand and at all the blood, but I don’t remember much after that.”
Beltz said he woke up hours later in the ICU at Presbyterian Hospital, with restraints binding his arms to the bed. “Apparently, I had been fighting them,” he said. “I don’t remember it.”
Beltz said he has since learned that someone at Humperdink’s called police and an ambulance, but that his in his state of inebriation coupled with shock from the attack, he apparently was combative and uncooperative. He said police at that time issued him a citation for being drunk and disorderly. He said that his mother came to pick him up from the hospital the next morning, and that although hospital officials discharged him, they didn’t give him any information about the injury to his hand, and they left one IV needle in his arm.
He also said that when he called to file a police report, Dallas police told him a report was already on record “but that report number is just linked to the citation they gave me. There’s nothing about the attack and my hand being stabbed.”
Beltz said the man who attacked him was white and had facial hair. He was wearing a tan jacket over a white t-shirt and blue jeans. He was wearing a hat and attacked Beltz with a folding pocketknife, the young man said. “I can’t say this is a hate crime, that he came after me because I am gay. But I can’t say it isn’t a hate crime,” he said. “He called me a bitch, and he was shouting some other stuff at me that I didn’t hear because I was running away and screaming for help. I don’t act like a girl, but I do have some feminine tendencies, I guess, that would have made him think I was gay.”
