Thirty minutes after Katelin Durnal and her brother Gregory left the Portland Pride parade on Sunday, June 17, a stranger punched Gregory in the face and called him a “faggot.”
The siblings had been walking along Northwest 21st Avenue, accompanied by Gregory’s girlfriend and their cousin, when the man approached the group and yelled homophobic slurs at Gregory before hitting him. Durnal—who was wearing a rainbow crown for the parade—fought to push the man, later identified as Justin Watling, off her brother.
“Have a gay day!” Durnal recalls Watling yelling as he fled the scene. Durnal then called 911 to report a hate crime.
When Portland police officers showed up and arrested Watling for assault, they told Durnal he had a record of mental illness and that it would be difficult to pursue hate crime charges—because her brother isn’t gay.
“They asked all of us what our sexual orientations were,” says Durnal. “They said they wouldn’t pursue the case as a hate crime unless anyone would go on the record as homosexual.”
This didn’t sit well with Durnal—so she called the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office to follow up. They scheduled her and her brother to testify against Watling before a grand jury later that week. The grand jury indicted Watling for second-degree “Intimidation”—the terminology used in Oregon’s hate crime law—along with one count of menacing and two counts of assault.
Had she not made that call, Durnal believes Watling’s assault wouldn’t have been investigated as a hate crime.
