Autism Women’s Network Calls for Federal Hate Crime Prosecution for the Murder of Alex Spourdalakis

On Sunday June 9, 2013, an Autistic young man was found murdered by his mother and godmother in yet another tragic act of violence against a disabled person. After repeatedly attempting to poison 14-year-old Alex Spourdalakis by forcing him to overdose on his medications, his mother and godmother finally stabbed him to death. In a statement the perpetrators later gave to the police, they admitted that they had planned the crime and that the murder was motivated because of the victim’s disability.

As an organization whose primary constituency is Autistic women and our allies, the Autism Women’s Network joins with the National Council on Disability and the Autistic Self Advocacy Network in calling for the prosecution of hate crimes against disabled people under the provisions of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Disabled people are disproportionately victimized by violent crimes of all types, yet media coverage of these incidents frequently suggests that the appropriate response ought to be sympathy for the aggressors rather than for the victims.

When disabled people are murdered, and particularly when the perpetrators are family members or caregivers, public discourse has a disturbing tendency to suggest that the lives of the disabled victims were the tragedies rather than their murders. Unscrupulous advocates frequently misappropriate such situations as evidence for much-needed reforms in availability and quality of supports and services. These types of claims do little more than underline rhetoric that exculpates the perpetrators.

Alex Spourdalakis was not murdered because of a lack of services or because his caregivers were too stressed from living with him. He was murdered because he was autistic.

AWN urges the FBI and state law enforcement authorities to investigate Alex’s murder as a hate crime because of the clear and convincing nature of the evidence that he was targeted based on his disability. Whenever disabled people are the victims of crimes clearly committed on the basis of disability, it is imperative that these crimes are recognized as motivated by hatred and investigated and prosecuted diligently as such. It is time to bring to an end the attitudes that excuse the murders of disabled people as understandable or inevitable. It is time to uphold the mandate of equal protection under the law through zealous advocacy on behalf of disabled people injured or killed because of hate.