Druggings, deaths and robberies put New York’s gay community on edge

NEW YORK — Julio Ramirez died in the back seat of a taxi in April after he left a popular gay bar in Manhattan with a group of men. They stole his wallet, phone and ID before they abandoned his body in the car with a distressed cab driver.

The deaths of Ramirez and Umberger came at a fraught time for the city’s LGBTQ community, which emerged from the pandemic into the jaws of an outbreak of mpox , a landscape of struggling and sometimes shuttered bars and an increasingly hostile national political climate. Some men who said they were drugged have struggled to convince police that they were the victims of a crime and not just irresponsible partygoers who took someone home and blacked out.

The Police Department did not respond to questions about whether the defendants in those cases were linked to the deaths of Ramirez or Umberger, who was drugged at the Q, a bar three blocks from the Ritz. Umberger’s family said the arrests were not related to his death, and Carlos Ramirez and other victims who spoke to The New York Times said they had received no updates from police.

Tyler Burt, 27, was robbed of more than $25,000 after he was drugged at the Boiler Room in the East Village last December. A drug test came back positive for cocaine, which he had no memory of taking, and his doctor suggested he had been drugged with GHB.“They asked me if I had been assaulted, and I was like, ‘Getting drugged is assault,’” he said. “It seemed like they thought being drugged wasn’t even a possibility. They said, ‘Maybe you were, but that isn’t really relevant to the robbery.

In addition, many gay bars are in or near midtown Manhattan, which has been transformed by pandemic-era economic collapse and acts of high-profile street crime. VERS, a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, had a brick thrown at its window four times in October and November.

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