Man Convicted In Hate Crime Murder Of Gay Dancer

The Associated Press reports:

A jury convicted a man of manslaughter as a hate crime on Monday in the death of beloved dancer and Philadelphia native O’Shae Sibley, who was killed at a Brooklyn gas station during a confrontation that began with a group of young people shouting racist and anti-gay slurs at the professional dancer and his friends as they vogued to a Beyoncé song.

Dmitriy Popov, 20, who was 17 at the time of the killing, testified at trial that he was just defending himself when he stabbed Sibley, 28, in 2023. Prosecutors said Popov acted out of hate, taunting and jeering at Sibley, then killing him when he reacted to the provocations. The verdict on the first-degree manslaughter charge capped a three-week trial in New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a release that it was his “hope that as the LGBTQ+ community celebrates the beginning of Pride Month, this verdict will bring O’Shae’s family, his friends, and the larger community some measure of solace. Hate has no place in Brooklyn.”

From a 2023 New York Daily News report:

A professional dancer voguing at a Brooklyn gas station after a trip to the Jersey Shore with his friends was stabbed to death during a confrontation Saturday night with a group of Muslim men who said the victim’s impromptu performance offended their faith, witnesses and friends told the Daily News.

O’Shae Sibley, 28, a professional dancer who has performed at Lincoln Center as part of an all-queer dance group, was blasting music and dancing with his pals at the Midwood Mobil station on Coney Island Ave and Avenue P just after 11 p.m. when their antics drew homophobic protests from a group of men nearby, authorities and witnesses said.

The NYPD is investigating the caught-on-video killing as a possible hate crime. Medics rushed Sibley, stabbed in the torso, to Maimonides Medical Center but he couldn’t be saved. The killer ran off on Coney Island Ave. and has not been caught.

From a 2023 Yahoo News reports:

Sibley was a favorite of director and choregrapher Kemar Jewel, who has worked with the Philidelphia-born dancer for more than a decade and described him as a virtuoso skilled in various forms of modern dance.

“He was really good at adding ballet stuff to a tap number or voguing to a hip hop number,” said Jewel. “You probably can find dancers that are versatile, but you won’t always find dancers that are good at mixing styles seamlessly.”

Jewel notably featured Sibley in his 2021 video “Soft: A Love Letter to Black Queer Men,” a nearly seven-minute performance that the Brooklyn dancer co-choreographed, which uses the art of contemporary dance to portray black feminine energy.

The murder was heavily covered here at its time.


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