A Gay Veteran Is Being Harassed By His Neighbors
A California resident and Air Force veteran is asking for police help after being repeatedly harassed by his neighbors.
Ryan Gierach says his neighbors have harassed him for being gay ever since he moved into his San Pedro home two years ago.
“When I came here my neighbors directly across from me began calling me names — all of them revolving around gay epithets,” he told KTLA.
Things got worse as Gierach decided to start hanging rainbow flags from his house around Pride season. The neighbors then started to throw garbage at him, yell out homophobic comments, and hit him.
To back up his story, Gierach has been recording incidents like those mentioned above. The police have seen a video of three women spitting at him and they say it counts as battery.
Sadly, things got even worse and Gierach found out that someone was posting flyers saying the he was a pedophile. The flyers called him “a child molesting sex offender,” and included his home address.
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For Gierach, who was kicked out of the Air Force in 1979 because he was gay and then worked as a journalist for the WeHo News, he’s used to seeing this type of anti-gay treatment.
“For 20 years now I've covered this sort of thing happening to other people,” he said. “And it hurt me deeply every time it happened to other people.”
Ulitmately, Gierach wants the harassment to stop. The Los Angeles Police Department says that they have received multiple reports from Gierach and that they are investigating. Unfortunately though, when they arrived to question the neighbors, no one was home.
In addition, Wehoville reports that this isn’t the first time Gierach has had problems with neighbors. He reportedly had similar problems when he lived in West Hollywood and he also had a methamphetamine addiction.
That said, the video proof verifies that Gierach's case is sincere, so police are still investigating.
