As the two rural Florida men who allegedly stabbed Ryan Skipper to death two weeks ago await trial in a local jail, questions are being asked about how the events leading up to the murder were described in the press.

The sequence of events that night as reported seemed not to add up from the start, when a Polk County Sheriff’s Dept. spokesman was quoted as saying:

Skipper was driving around Wahneta on Tuesday night when he found [21-year-old Joseph] Bearden walking along Sixth Street in Eloise about 11 p.m. Tuesday, and offered him a ride. The two went back to Skipper’s house, where they smoked marijuana and discussed using Skipper’s computer to copy checks, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

The problem with this statement is that it appears to come from a single source: Joseph Bearden, the alleged murderer and apparent homophobe.

However, there was at least one other witness who was apparently not consulted by investigators. Ryan had two roommates, including one, Kelly Evans, who says she was home all night on the evening in question:

Evans was home the night of the murder and disputes what has been reported in the news. “Ryan went out and never came back,” Evans said. “They keep saying he was here with those two guys, smoking marijuana and taking his computer when they left. I was here. That never happened. He wouldn’t do that.”

Did early reporting get this wrong or did investigators base their timeline solely on the word of a young man whom they suspected of murder? One investigator also made this odd declaration: “What we do know is that Ryan was out looking to pick up someone that evening.” How could the police “know” this? They might suspect it, especially if that’s how the young alleged murderer characterized Ryan’s motives. Similarly, investigators appear to have accepted without scrutiny the alleged murder’s claim that Skipper was conspiring with him in a forgery scheme.

The reality is, only one person could have actually “known” for certain what Skipper’s intentions were that night, or whether he conspired to forge checks with someone he’d only just met. That would be Ryan Skipper himself, and the fact that he can’t defend himself against these slurs compounds the tragedy of his death.

Joseph Bearden and William Brown, 20, whom Kelly Evans describes as a relative of her landlord, are accused of stabbing Skipper 20 times and dumping his body on the shoulder of a road. Brown later told someone that “Ryan Skipper was messing with him, that Ryan Skipper was a homosexual, so [he] killed him.”

All of this brings to mind memories of the murder of college student Matthew Shepherd in Wyoming a decade ago. Like Ryan Skipper, who was 25 years old, Shepherd was killed violently by two young men and left to die on the side of a rural road.

As the Shepherd case advanced, the killers tried to assert the “gay panic defense,” saying they were driven to temporary insanity by their victim’s alleged sexual advances. Later, they said they only wanted to rob him and never intended to kill him when they lashed him to a fence and bashed his head in.

Reports say Skipper’s murder is being treated as a hate crime. But what remains to be seen is whether entrenched homophobia will prevent this heinous crime from being investigated and tried objectively.