SANDY, Utah, July 31, 2022 (Gephardt Daily) — A juvenile suspect has been arrested after he allegedly stopped the car he was in to assault a Sandy juvenile male standing in his driveway as he hugged his boyfriend.
Project Rainbow shared a video recorded at the scene, after the assault, which happened at about 12:20 a.m. Saturday.
“A gay young man was hugging his boyfriend in front of his home,” the Twitter post says. “The young men in this Infiniti stopped and the one person punched the kid in the face while calling him a ‘fa**ot.’ We need to identify this assailant. Contact Sandy, UT police.”
The video, posted the afternoon after the assault, had drawn more than 2,000 shares and nearly 9,000 views by Sunday afternoon.
But Sandy City police caught up with their suspect Saturday afternoon, Sgt. Greg Moffitt, Sandy City Police, told Gephardt Daily. The suspect’s identity will not be shared due to his juvenile status.
“Our officers were able to locate that suspect and he was taken into custody, he was arrested and the charges, because of the nature of this of this case, we are looking at it as a hate crime,” Moffitt said.
“So the root charge was a simple assault. But because of the hate crime it will be enhanced to a class A misdemeanor assault. And so the charges will be sent to the juvenile court for screening.”
Moffitt said he does not have information on the sequence of events that led to the arrest, but he thinks people spreading the word on social media can speed up the process.
“I know that social media and having out on the video put out on social media garnered a lot of attention,” he said.
