NEW YORK — A gunman used homophobic slurs before firing a fatal shot point-blank into a man's face on a Manhattan street alive with a weekend midnight crowd, a killing New York's police commissioner called an "anti-gay" hate crime.
Before opening fire early Saturday, the gunman confronted the victim and his companion in Greenwich Village and asked if they "want to die here," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. The shooting follows a series of recent bias attacks on gay men in New York, but this was the first deadly one.