On September 22, 2000, 54-year-old Ronald Edward Gay opened fire inside Backstreet Cafe, a predominately gay bar in Roanoke, Virginia, United States. Gay murdered one man and injured six others. Gay described himself as a "Christian soldier" and said that all LGBTQ "meeting places and bars will be destroyed" if gay people did not move to San Francisco. Police said that he was also angry over the connotations of his surname, although he later denied this was the case, and that he was upset that two of his sons had changed their surnames. On July 23, 2001, Gay was found guilty of one count of first-degree murder, three counts of aggravated malicious wounding, and three suspended counts of malicious wounding, and sentenced to four consecutive life terms. Gay died at a hospital on January 15, 2022, of natural causes.
Background In 1971, Roanoke's first gay rights group, The Gay Alliance of the Roanoke Valley, was founded. However, it only lasted until the following year. The city would be without another gay rights group until 1977, when the Free Alliance of Individual Rights was founded, but that too would last only until the following year. Since 1978, various LGBTQ rights groups have been active in the city.
At the time of the shooting, same-sex sexual intercourse was illegal in Virginia, something that would not be rectified until 2003, when the Supreme Court ruled that laws that criminalized sodomy between consenting adults were unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas. Additionally, hate crime laws in Virginia did not protect sexual orientation or gender identity at the time of the shooting. A year prior, a bill to expand hate crime legislation to protect people based on their sexual orientation failed by one vote in a Virginia Senate committee. In 2000, Backstreet Cafe was one of three active LGBTQ bars, clubs, or restaurants in Roanoke, with the first one, Elmwood Diner, being established in the mid-1920s and lasting until the early 1970s.
Shooting On the day of the shooting, Ronald Edward Gay booked a room at a downtown motel in Roanoke, after telling a taxi cab driver he was going there to take a shower and asked him to pick him up from there the next morning. Gay socialized with two people who had booked a room next to his, and reportedly introduced himself with his full name and told them "I'm not gay like my name sounds". The group drank whiskey together and late that evening, Gay gave them the key to his room and told them that if he didn't return by the next morning they could have everything in his room and that he was going out to eat at McDonald's and watch fireworks. Before leaving, Gay told them to watch the news in the morning if he didn't return and winked and grinned at them. After leaving the motel, Gay went to a tavern in Roanoke for directions to the nearest gay bar. After being told of Backstreet Cafe, Gay showed off his 9 mm automatic pistol to the patrons at the restaurant, prompting them to call the police.
Gay entered Backstreet Cafe at around 11:30 p.m. ET and ordered a draft beer. Gay pulled out his pistol upon seeing two men hug, and opened fire, killing 43-year-old Danny Overstreet and wounding 39-year-old John Collins. Collins reported seeing Gay stand up as the pair finished their hug and then pull out the pistol from a black trench coat he was wearing before opening fire. After shooting Overstreet and Collins, Gay sprayed the bar with gunfire, wounding five other people. Collins recalled Gay stepping over him as he pretended to be dead before Gay exited through the front door. After Gay left, the manager of the bar locked the door as survivors began tending to the wounded victims, putting sweaters and jackets onto wounds to slow bleeding. Overstreet's body was covered with a table cloth so that people wouldn't be able to see his body.
After leaving, Gay disposed of the pistol in a trash can near the Virginia Museum of Transportation, stating that he got rid of it because he didn't want to hurt a police officer. Gay was apprehended by police two blocks away from the bar. The arresting officer conducted an interview of Gay with audio from his patrol car. The officer asked Gay where he came from, to which Gay replied that he had come "from a fag bar and blew them away". The officer asked Gay why he had done that, to which Gay replied that "the Lord told me to". Gay then asked the officer to "put [him] to death", to which the officer responded that he wouldn't.
Victims One man was killed in the attack, and two men and four women suffered gunshot wounds. The murdered victim was 43-year-old Danny Overstreet, who worked as a beautician and for Verizon as a customer service representative. Overstreet died within minutes of being shot in the chest. The injured victims were identified as 41-year-old Iris Webb, who was critically injured after being shot in the neck, 39-year-old John Collins, who was shot in the stomach with a bullet rupturing his colon and exiting through his hip, 40-year-old Joel Tucker, who was shot in the back, 36-year-old Kathy Caldwell, who was shot in the left hand, losing her left middle knuckle, and right shoulder, 45-year-old Susan Smith, who was shot in the right leg, and 41-year-old Linda Conyers, who was shot in the right arm and hand.
Some victims of the shooting expressed fear of discrimination after the injuries they suffered in the shooting outed them, with Tucker fearing being attacked again after newspapers published his address. Tucker said that he lied and told reporters that he was straight and that he was there with his girlfriend and returned to work with a bullet in his back in order to prevent himself from being outed. Some witnesses to the shooting also declined to give their full names when conducting interviews after the shooting out of similar fears.
Legal proceedings Ronald Edward Gay was charged with first-degree murder and initially six counts of aggravated malicious wounding, but the latter was downgraded to just six counts of malicious wounding by Roanoke commonwealth's attorney, Donald Caldwell, as the injuries to the surviving victims did not cause permanent physical pain and impairment, according to assistant commonwealth's attorney John McNeil. Gay plead guilty to the charges, but nearly withdrew the guilty plea before taking a conference with his defense lawyers. Gay's defense also considered using the insanity defense, and his family paid for analysts to study it, but a psychiatrist and psychologist who examined Gay determined that he was sound of mind. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors dropped seven firearms charges against him which would have added 33 years to a sentence of at least 95 years, leaving a maximum of four life terms plus 60 years. Gay was made eligible for geriatric release, but needed to be in very poor health in order to receive it.
During his plea hearing, Gay interjected repeatedly during circuit judge Clifford Weckstein's questioning, stating that he "didn't know" any of the people that he shot and that it "was not a hate crime". Gay also said during the hearing that he had the idea of committing the shooting for years, and that he "buried" the idea until he had been "driven insane" to do it. Gay also requested to look at a picture of Danny Overstreet at the scene, the man he had killed, and said that it was "not the guy I shot", saying that he remembered shooting a man wearing a cap, a wig, and a buckskin jacket, but according to Caldwell, of those items Overstreet had only been wearing a cap at the time of his death. Gay also said that his initial claim to police that he had committed the shooting because of his last name was false, and if it had been because of his name he "would've done it 10 years ago". Weckstein did not immediately schedule a sentencing date for Gay in order to allow the defense to study Gay's psychological history.
On July 23, 2001, Gay was sentenced to four consecutive sentences of life in prison for first-degree murder and three counts of aggravated malicious wounding as physical pain to three of the victims persisted. In addition to those sentences, Gay also received three five-year suspended sentences for three counts of malicious wounding. Gay remained eligible for geriatric release, but Weckstein ruled that if that were to happen, he would be required to be under intense supervision. A victim of the shooting, Kathy Caldwell, who was in attendance for the sentencing said that Gay stared at her, nodded up and down, and pointed an index finger skyward, which she interpreted as him referencing Judgement Day. A psychologist who analyzed Gay and testified for the defense said that it was a "close call" to not use the insanity defense. Gay served his sentence at Deerfield Correctional Center in Southampton County.
Perpetrator Ronald Edward Gay (December 22, 1945 – January 15, 2022) was born in Canada and grew up in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Gay married six times, twice to the same woman, and had three sons. When Gay turned 18-years-old, he immigrated to the United States to become a US citizen and join the US Marine Corps. In 1966, while Gay was in boot camp, his father, Cecil Gay, died, and his mother remarried and moved to Saskatchewan. At the time of his father's death, the Gay family were in a land dispute with the Canadian government. The family alleged that the Canadian government never compensated them for land that it had appropriated from them in the 1940s, and shortly after his father's funeral, Gay set up camp on the land in an attempt to claim it from the government. Gay's brother said that his brother planned to build a bunker on the land, and that Gay drove a truck filled with sand to the property to make sandbags on-site, but that the truck's axle had broken on the way.
Gay served one tour of duty in Vietnam during the Vietnam War before returning to the United States in 1969, where he moved to northern Virginia and married his first wife. While serving in Vietnam, Gay was a gunner charged with protecting convoys from enemy fire. According to Gay's brother, a truck with several of Gay's friends inside was destroyed in an attack and Gay had to collect the body parts of the victims. Gay suffered a back injury during his tour of duty in Vietnam, for which he received a pension, and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder which he sought treatment for at various veterans hospitals. A psychologist who analyzed Gay said that "he was an odd fellow" before joining the Marines, and that he had been "sort of a fragile egg" when he joined, and that through his service he became a "much more odd fellow".
After divorcing his second wife, Jeannie Gay, he moved to Tennessee from Virginia, where he was briefly homeless and married his third wife. While in Tennessee, Gay received treatment at a Veterans Affair (VA) hospital in Johnson City. He divorced his third wife at some point and then moved to Florida in 1992, where he married his fourth wife two years later, but they divorced not long after, but through her he met his fifth wife, Laura Ramsey, who he married in 1994. At the time they met, Ramsey was in a same-sex relationship, which he was aware of and did not appear to take issue with.
After Gay and Ramsey divorced, he rented a home in Huddleston, Virginia. In April 2000, first responders were called to Gay's home after he reportedly burned his legs while attempting to burn his divorce papers and some brush with gasoline a few days earlier. The following month, Gay's home was destroyed in a fire which investigators determined had been caused by a clothes dryer.