A judge on Thursday sentenced 20-year-old Brooklyn man Dmitriy Popov for first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime after he stabbed 28-year-old gay dancer O’Shae Sibley to death in a gas station on July 29, 2023. Popov committed the crime when he was 17 and claimed self-defense, but he was tried as an adult.
“My brother should not have been killed. He did nothing wrong,” Dezirah Kelly, one of Sibley’s sisters, told the judge during court hearings, Gothamist reported. “Being true to himself should have been inspiration and not looked at as if it was a weapon. Happiness should inspire other people to be happy — not to inflict harm.”
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Sibley and his friends (who were all Black, gay men) were dancing to Beyoncé in their bathing suits while refueling their vehicle after a day on the beach. A group of young men and teenagers, including then-17-year-old Popov, approached Sibley and his friends and told them to stop dancing.
Surveillance video of the altercation reportedly showed Sibley and friends exchanging heated words with the young men, one of whom was seen recording the interaction on his phone. The two groups eventually began to disperse, but one witness claimed that the group of young men continued to harass Sibley and his friends as they left. Another witness claimed the group may have continued to make anti-LGBTQ+ comments. Sibley’s group returned to the storefront to confront the other group, and a fight broke out between Sibley and the man recording on his phone.
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“Get that gay s**t out of here,” prosecutors alleged Popov and his friends told Sibley and his friends.
Popov testified in court that, while others in his group used slurs, he did not. He told the court that he was “telling them, you guys get out of here” and that “I felt I was slowly getting surrounded.”
Popov said that he pulled a five-and-a-half-inch kitchen knife out of his pocket and that he only intended to threaten Sibley. Sibley then ran at him, and that’s when Popov stabbed Sibley in the chest, puncturing his heart and killing him.
Prosecutors asked Popov why he didn’t run away, and he said he “didn’t want to be hit from the back.”
Otis Pena, who was present at the scene of the crime, told the judge, “It messed me up to have my brother die in my arms.” He moved to New York City with Sibley to pursue their dance careers, but Pena now said he now experiences night terrors about his friend’s killing and has to take various medications to cope with its lasting effects on his mental health.
Sibley’s other friends told the judge that they now fear being targeted for being queer men of color.
“I know that nothing I can say would change or bring O’Shae back. I know it’s very hard for everybody that loved him,” Popov said during the sentencing. “No matter the outcome of my sentence, I just ask for forgiveness from the family, the friends and their loved ones. I would want everybody to know that this had nothing to do with race, with sexuality. It had nothing to do with that.”
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