People march during the 2017 Miami Beach Gay Pride parade on April 9. (Emily Michot/Miami Herald/AP)
By Meagan Flynn with The Washington Post
It was dusk at Miami Beach, the annual gay pride parade was over and Rene Chalarca and his boyfriend, Dmitry Logunov, shared a hug.
They were waiting in line for a public bathroom along Ocean Drive. As they left, they said, they were holding hands when Logunov accidentally bumped into a stranger, 21-year-old Juan Carlos Lopez.
And that’s when police say the attack began.
Lopez and three other men who were with him are accused of beating Chalarca and Logunov while yelling a gay slur at them in Spanish, “maricones.” The April 8 beating was captured on surveillance video, which police say shows Lopez and the others repeatedly punching Chalarca and Logunov in the face so hard they fell to the ground. Logunov, in fact, had been temporarily knocked unconscious, according to Miami Beach police.