Julio Rivera

Rivera, 29, was worked as a bartender, and had lived in Jackson Heights for 10 years.He was the
youngest of six children, raised in the South Bronx. He dropped out of school in the seventh grade,
and moved to Manhattan as a teenager.
On the night Rivera was attacked, he had been returning from a friends house in Rego Park to the
Jackson Heights apartment he shared with a friend. Rivera was attacked on the Jackson Heights
playground at around 3:00 a.m. on July 2, 1990
At some point on his way home, Rivera encountered Brown. Brown, a former student at the Art Students
League in Manhattan, had been chosen to approach and lure Rivera because his shoulder length hair
made his less threatening than Doyle and Bici, whose heads were shaved in skinhead fashion. Brown
lured Rivera to the playground, where Bici and Doyle appeared. Bici then hit Rivera in the head with
a 40-ouce beer bottle, causing him to double over. Bici then took out a hammer and began attacking
Rivera with it. Doyle punched Rivera in the face, kicked him in the stomach, and then stabbed
Rivera, delivering the would that would prove to be fatal. At trial the prosecutor claimed that
Brown also hit Rivera in the face with a wrench, but Doyle did not mention that in his testimony.
Garzon died of the wounds sustained from the attack in the playground on 77th Street. According to
gays in the area, attacks like the one that killed Rivera had been going on in the area for 15
years.
Doyle said that he, Bici, and Brown had been drinking heavily at a party at his house on the night
of the attack. Afterwards, they went out with a claw hammer, a wrench, and a beer bottle, looking
for “a drug dealer or a drug addict or a homo out cruising” to assault. Doyle told Brown that he
would like to “beat some people up, stretch some people out.”They went to the school yard
because they knew it was a place where gay men often went to cruise.
He was beaten like they wouldn't beat a dog.