GALVESTON — A 4-pound stone, one of several door stops hurled at patrons in a bar that includes gay people among its clientele, left one man with 12 staples in the back of his head and two brothers and an acquaintance accused of a hate crime.
Marc Bosaw, 57, said Monday he has little recollection of the Sunday night attack, in which police said one suspect held open the door to Robert’s Lafitte bar while two others launched an assault shortly after 8 p.m.
Bosaw sat at the corner of the bar at 2501 Ave. Q just a few feet from one of two entryway doors.
“I thought I had just been slapped, and the second rock hit me here,” Bosaw said of the mark on his hand. “Everything went white in my mind, and I thought that was it. I even said ‘goodbye.’”
The barrage also hit another patron, James Nickelson, 39, who police listed as a Houston resident, but bar patrons said Monday they believed he had recently moved to the island.
Bonds for Lawrence Henry Lewis III, 20, Lawrneil Henry Lewis, 18, and Alejandro Sam Gray, 17, all of Galveston, were set at $120,000 each on two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with the enhancement of a hate crime, said Lt. D.J. Alvarez, a Galveston police spokesman.
Victor Clements, 47, said that as he compressed the back of his 13-year partner’s bleeding head, witnesses chased after three men and gave a description to police.
Meanwhile, bar patrons, including a psychiatrist, tried to keep Bosaw conscious, bracing him to keep him on his feet near the billiard table.
“I kind of blacked out, and the doctor of psychiatry was sitting next to me,” Bosaw said. “He said I had a weak pulse and made me breathe deeply and kept shaking me.”
Police called an ambulance. Nickelson, who was hit in the jaw, refused treatment. The ambulance took Bosaw to Clear Lake Regional Medical Center, where medical staff placed 12 metal staples in his head, released him about midnight and told him he should be watched for a couple of days.
Police swept through the neighborhood and found three men who were brought back to the bar for identification by witnesses, Alvarez said.
“It’s sad that this type of behavior occurred in our city,” Alvarez said. “It was good police work” to make the arrests quickly, he said.
The district attorney’s office authorized the hate crime charge because the motive was to harass and the intent was to randomly assault them based on their sexual preference, Alvarez said.
Bosaw, who spent six years in the U.S. Navy aboard a submarine, said he joined the military when he was 20 and it was then that he realized he was gay.
While sitting at another bar Monday, Bosaw said he became completely aware of his surroundings on the ambulance ride. He was feeling OK, except for the large and painful laceration to his head.
“I was just sitting there innocently having a cocktail,” Bosaw said. “We had just arrived and were sitting there for two minutes.”
Yvonne Gordon of Galveston said she was at the bar during the melee.
Police took the rock that hit Bosaw as evidence. It has his hair still attached, Gordon said.
Lafitte bartender Joel Hickman, who was not on duty Sunday night, said the establishment is basically known as a gay bar.
“Everybody around here knows that, but not all our clientele is gay.”
