Hate Crime 2006

Robbie Levinson and Trey McCoy, Seth Peterson and Brian J. Smith respectively, are an openly gay couple living in a quiet suburban home near friend and next-door neighbor Kathleen Slansky, Lin Shaye. They’re planning a commitment ceremony to exchange rings, a step that fills their daily life with anticipation and a sense of permanence. Trey’s mother Barbara, Cindy Pickett, suggests to Trey that the couple consider raising a child, a proposal that adds a new dimension to their hopes for the future and stirs quiet debates about family, responsibility, and belonging.

Tension rises when Chris Boyd, Chad Donella, arrives next door with a moving truck, accompanied by his friend Alton Kachim, Luke King. They watch Trey kiss Robbie with a mix of surprise and discomfort, and Alton’s crude homophobic jokes only deepen the unease. Chris, a youth pastor and the son of Pastor Boyd, Bruce Davison condemns homosexuality with a fervor that reverberates through the neighborhood. After Kathleen refuses a church pamphlet, Chris delivers it anyway and warns of consequences if he gets involved, while Robbie begins to learn about the church his neighbor supports and the complex history surrounding Pastor Boyd, who is angered by the scandalous estrangement from his supposed daughter-in-law.

Tragedy strikes when Trey is brutally attacked with a baseball bat while walking his Boston Terrier and is left in a hospital bed, unconscious and eventually slipping into a coma. With a criminal investigation opening, the Boyd family conspires to craft an alibi for Chris, even as Robbie resolves to commit to Trey, wearing their rings as a symbol of their bond. Yet Trey’s condition worsens, suffering a severe brain hemorrhage, and he dies without ever waking. At Trey’s viewing, Robbie wears the rings as a quiet, painful vow to keep Trey’s memory alive.

The case is reassigned to homicide Detective Esposito, Giancarlo Esposito, who questions Robbie and points out the troubling fingerprint evidence on the murder weapon, casting doubt on Robbie’s innocence. Robbie is briefly arrested and given a restraining order after a failed attempt to obtain a secretly recorded confession from Chris. Undeterred, Robbie later enters Chris’s home and discovers gay pornography in his internet bookmarks, a detail that begins to unravel the night’s tangled motives.

Pastor Boyd confronts Chris with photographs from a private investigator showing Chris meeting for anonymous gay sex on multiple occasions, revealing that Chris was with a lover on the night of the murder. Detective Fisher, Farah White, contacts Alton, who surmises that Chris killed Trey as the night’s alibi collapses. Pastor Boyd finally confronts his son and confesses to the murder, a confession that Robbie records on a tape and hands to Esposito. Esposito hesitates to pursue the pastor, confiscating the tape, but Barbara recovers it, keeping the evidence alive.

Chris laments his fate, considering suicide, but he refuses to testify against his father, and he even leaves Robbie his father’s gun. Driven to seek justice and truth, Robbie, Kathleen, and Barbara devise a plan to break into the Boyd home in disguise to retrieve the tape-recording. With Chris’s testimony against his dead father, Esposito reluctantly accepts the staged break-in as a legitimate path to truth, and the case threads toward its tense, morally fraught resolution.