Town Divided

Rifle police disagree with boy, 16, who says he was beaten for being gay.

By Peggy Lowe, News Staff Writer

The night started with a simple invitation.

"Do you want to party?" the boy asked.

"I said, 'Cool, I got nothin' to do,' " said Kyle Skyock.

At the end of that frigid winter night seven months ago, Skyock said four other teens turned on him, beating him unconscious and leaving him face down alongside U.S. 6.

The dark, slightly built 16-year-old said he was attacked because the four boys thought he was gay.

But Rifle police have decided otherwise. They say it was a case of a drunk kid who fell down and injured himself. Police Chief Daryl Meisner said the four teens identified by Skyock as his attackers are not considered suspects.

The investigation remains open, Meisner said.

Skyock's injuries were:

Large purple bruises on the front and back of his head.

A circle of burn blisters on his left shoulder.

A blackened right eye.

Three broken ribs.

A foot-shaped bruise on his stomach.

Another bruise a doctor described as in the shape of a 2-by-4.

The gossip traded over coffee at local cafes about how Skyock came to be so gravely injured has died down some - replaced by the grief and frustration over the murders of four Mexican nationals in July.

But folks who held fund-raisers for Skyock's hospital bills say they believe the police have not done their job.

"I know this town, and it was a complete coverup," said Cathy Meskel, owner of Nola's Ark, a Rifle pet store. "Now it's out of sight, out of mind. If we don't think about it or talk about it, it will go away."

But it won't go away for Skyock or his mother, Sharlene Skyock. Yes, they admit, he was drunk. Yes, he agreed to go with the boys.

Skyock's injuries and his recollections all point to one thing, they say. The family knew it right away. As his aunts and grandmother gathered around his hospital bed shortly after he was found, staring down at Skyock's battered body, his mother spoke up:

"I said, 'One word: Matthew Shepard,' " said Sharlene Skyock, using the name of the murdered Wyoming college student who has become synonymous with hate crimes.

"And every single one of them said, 'Yes.' "

Elks lodge employee

Friday, Feb. 10 was a big night at the Rifle Elks Lodge. The annual "Crab Crack," fund-raiser for the Elks National Foundation included a dinner and dance, all-you-can-eat snow crab for $15.

Rifle, named in the late 1800s for the creek where a settler lost and found his gun, is a town of 6,700 nestled in between the Colorado River and the stark gray mesas looming to the north called The Bookcliffs. It's a ranching town and a popular base camp for elk and deer hunters in the fall months.

Rifle was once famous as a "Saturday night town," where the residents of the nearby cattle ranches and other workers came in once a week for a good time, a cold beer, a night out.

Kyle Skyock didn't usually work Saturday nights, but his boss, Elks manager Kim Herwick asked him to help out with the big event. Kyle had worked every Friday night, washing dishes and doing other kitchen duties, for about two years.

He was popular at the lodge, known as a hard worker, friendly, and a real show stopper on kareoke night, singing everything from Broadway show tunes to the Backstreet Boys. Herwick describes the 5-foot-4, 115 pound youth as "a perfect employee."

"He smiles. He's a go-getter. He's always happy," she said. "The customers love him."

Kyle got off work at 11 p.m. and was hanging around, talking to people, including his two aunts, Laurie Evans and Barbara Keithley.

Then, Kyle ran into a boy he'd gone to school with in Rifle. The boy introduced him to his older brother and they invited him to a party. Kyle called his mom and told her he was staying overnight at a friend's house and not to worry.

The trio left the lodge at 11:45 p.m. and went to a home up on Fourth Street in Rifle. Kyle says he was handed a bottle of wine and urged to drink. The boys also smoked pot, then the party moved next door to the home of another pair of brothers.

The party didn't last long. Kyle's memory is fuzzy, but he vaguely remembers the boys' mother yelling at him. The party broke up.

It's here, outside the small home on Rifle's Fourth Avenue, is where Kyle's and the brothers' stories take dramatically different turns. Kyle says the party continued, the others say the party came to an end.

Kyle says the boy who initially had asked him to go party pointed to his car and said, "Let's go." Kyle says he left with the two sets of brothers, getting into the back seat of a four-wheel-drive Bronco-type vehicle.

The car drove out of town, heading south towards Interstate 70, when Kyle said he noticed the driver make a call on his cell phone. Kyle remembered wondering who the boy would call, but then he got further confused because he smelled something like fingernail polish.

After more driving around, the car suddenly stopped and Kyle remembers being pulled out of the vehicle, thrown to the ground and the boys started kicking him. They picked him up, ramming his head into the tailgate of the vehicle. They threw him back in the vehicle, punched him some more. They pulled him out, kicked him again.

"I heard, 'faggot,"' Kyle said. "I want a turn with the bat! Give it to me. It's my turn, it's my turn."'

He was slammed with something hard from behind - his left shoulder, then again and again. Kyle felt "a jolting pain, like electricity."

"Everything turned purple and red and glowing colors and I heard this buzz," Kyle said.

Then, nothing.

Found face down

It snowed in Rifle that night and the temperature fell to 27 degrees. Sunday morning was cloudy and cold and Dave Gearhart was on foot.

Gearhart left his Rifle home about 7 a.m., planning to meet some buddies to ride snowmobiles up on the Flat Tops, mountains and wilderness north of town. But his car broke down on U.S 6 and he was walking back home.

At 7:30 a.m. he was rounding the last bend in the road before town, a 50-foot cliff of rock and dirt, and saw something lying under the city limits sign.

It was Skyock, face down, coatless, under the sign that read: Rifle, Elevation 5,345.

"I thought it was a dead Mexican," Gearhart recalled.

Did she have a son?

Sharlene Skyock got a call Sunday afternoon. A nurse at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction asked if she had a son.

Sharlene and Mike Skyock had already lost their only other child, 16-year-old Jesse, just eight months earlier when he drowned in the reservoir at Harvey Gap State Park, north of Rifle. The couple is divorced.

It was hard at first to find out what happened to Kyle Skyock because he was in and out of consciousness. After being checked at the Rifle hospital, he was soon transported by Flight for Life to St. Mary's, where he stayed for a week.

When he recovered sufficiently for his memory to return, the family pieced together what they believe happened that night.

They think the brothers planned the attack, using the cellphone to perhaps call someone in another vehicle. The smell of fingernail polish was some kind of lighter, used to burn a circle on Skyock's left shoulder. Nurses told his mother that the burn - about the size of the bottom of a coffee mug - was caused by "flame to flesh."

They believe he was singled out because he looked and acted gay.

"I was the first person to walk though the door with something (his body) to beat up," Skyock said.

Police disagree.

Chief Meisner said the four boys tell a completely different story. When police questioned them, the boys said Skyock left the party and that was the end of the night. Their parents back up their stories, Meisner said.

Attempts to reach the four boys and their parents for this story were unsuccessful.

The Skyock family and the police are feuding. In March, police said they wanted to interview Kyle Skyock alone. His mother wouldn't allow it, insisting on being with her son. Colorado law says juveniles suspected of a crime must have a parent's consent to be interviewed, but not minors who are victims or witnesses.

The family is highly critical of how the police handled the case. They say the police were slow to interview people and wouldn't respond to the family's reports gathered from other witnesses.

What, the family asks, about the kids on the school bus who reported that the boys were bragging about beating Skyock because he was "a fag"?

But police defend their work, saying they have tape-recorded 28 interviews, sought an opinion by a forensic pathologist and are keeping the door open for Skyock to talk.

Meisner said he feels confident that the police know what happened. Sometimes, he said, people don't want to believe that bad things happen to nice people.

Here's what Meisner believes happened: Skyock went to the party, leaving the house on Fourth Avenue about 12:30 a.m. He then walked along White River Avenue and onto U.S. 6 for about half a mile, where he stumbled and fell unconscious under the Rifle city limit sign.

The physical evidence is consistent, Meisner said, with someone getting drunk and falling down.

"How can we possibly make the quantum leap to say it was a hate crime or a bias crime in any way?" Meisner said. "We're bound by fact."

Dr. Rob Kurtzman, the forensic pathologist at Grand Junction's Community Hospital, is more blunt. Skyock was "incredibly intoxicated," Kurtzman said. His blood-alcohol level was two times the legal limit when he was found Sunday morning, meaning it was even higher eight hours earlier when any alleged beating would have occurred.

His injuries were "classic for a fall" and the cuffs of his pants were caked with mud.

"It becomes a very easy scapegoat to bypass personal responsibility and blame it on somebody else," Kurtzman said.

Meisner has an explanation for the injuries: The shoe-shaped bruise on Skyock's belly was just six inches long, about the size of the round rocks in the area where he fell. The stories reported by the kids on the bus of bragging about beating "a fag," proved false.

The circle of blistering on his left shoulder could be a pressure sore or a bed sore. Perhaps the sore grew on his shoulder as he lay face down on the road, Meisner said.

"He laid there for six or eight hours without moving," he said.

But another doctor who saw Skyock the morning he was found had a different opinion.

He had a lack of bruising to his arms and legs, but had multiple bruises and abrasions centrally located on the chest, wrote Dr. Kurt Papenfus of Clagett Memorial Hospital in Rifle. The bruises looked like "direct blows to the chest," he wrote. An "odd square" on Skyock's stomach appeared to be made by a 2-by-4.

The blistering on his left shoulder is consistent with a burn, Papenfus wrote, "and one would not expect receiving a burn from a fall off a dirt embankment." A bed sore wouldn't be blistered but rather have a redness, the doctor said later.

"When I saw him at the time it looked like an assault," Papenfus said.

Seven months later, Meisner said he still wants to talk to Skyock, saying a person would be more willing to be honest when he's alone.

"I certainly wouldn't want to close the door on someone walking in here with credible evidence," Meisner said. "We would be back on it like ugly on an ape."

House 'arrest'

The family is scared. Sharlene Skyock worries that the four boys will try to hurt her son again. Having already lost one son, she is petrified that she'll lose Kyle, too. They sleep with the lights on at night. Skyock jokes that his mother has him under house arrest.

The family knows life in Rifle will be hard this last year, his high school senior year. Skyock attends a private school in the nearby town of Newcastle.

He is back working at the lodge, and sometimes his mother allows him to sing karaoke at local clubs with his girlfriends. He has no permanent injuries, but his friends say he's different. He acts more masculine, they say to him, and he agrees.

He and his mother are also coming to terms with another difficult subject, his sexual orientation. They had never spoken of it before what they now call "the incident." But the mother had always known, as had the son.

"It's just always been that way," Skyock said. "It's always been there."

He feels his option on coming out of the closet was taken from him. He reads about the Cortez killing of Fred Martinez Jr. and cringes at the headline that starts with, "gay teen." He's mortified about being identified as gay in a newspaper, and wonders if a story could leave out his sexual orientation.

Still, Skyock is sometimes happy to be talking about being gay.

"It's a relief to know who I am," he said. "I am who I am."

Some townsfolk say they don't care that Skyock is gay, but they feel strongly that his attackers should be brought to justice. If it can happen to him, they say, it can happen to anyone.

"It needs to be resolved," said Kim Herwick, Skyock's boss. "We need to find out what happened to him."  

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