O'Shae Sibley was killed for dancing. The verdict.
A gay dancer was stabbed at a Brooklyn gas station in 2023 after vogueing to Beyonce. In 2026, a jury called it a hate crime.
O'Shae Sibley was 28, a professional dancer from Philadelphia. On the night of July 29, 2023, he and friends stopped at a gas station on Coney Island Avenue in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. While they refueled, they started vogueing to Beyonce's "Renaissance" album, dancing right there in the lot.
A group of young men nearby took issue. Witnesses and prosecutors described them hurling racist and anti-gay slurs at Sibley and his friends. The confrontation escalated. Dmitriy Popov, then 17, stabbed Sibley in the chest. Sibley died at a nearby hospital. Part of the killing was caught on video, and it spread fast.
The case became a marker almost overnight. Public figures and dancers pointed to a man killed for dancing in public while gay and Black.
Popov was charged and tried as an adult, despite being a minor when it happened. He took the stand in his own defense and claimed he stabbed Sibley to protect himself. Prosecutors told it the other way: Popov and his group started the encounter with slurs, and Popov killed Sibley out of bias when Sibley pushed back.
The jury came back in June 2026, during Pride Month. It convicted Popov of first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime. It acquitted him of the more serious charge, murder as a hate crime, which had carried the possibility of a life sentence. It also convicted him on lesser counts.
The hate-crime designation is what sets this outcome apart from so many killings of LGBTQ+ people. A New York jury formally found that anti-gay bias drove the killing. That finding raises the sentencing exposure and writes the motive into the conviction itself, instead of leaving it as background.
Manslaughter as a hate crime in New York carries a sentence of up to 25 years. As of mid-June 2026, Popov had not yet been sentenced. Sentencing was scheduled for June 30. The exact term he will serve is not yet known.
The split verdict tracks a familiar tension. The jury accepted that bias motivated the attack but stopped short of finding the intent to kill that a murder conviction requires. For Sibley's family and supporters, the hate-crime manslaughter finding said the killing was about who Sibley was. The murder acquittal marked the limit of how far the jury would go.
Sibley was dancing. That sits at the center of every account of his death. The jury's hate-crime finding confirmed what his friends said from the first night. He was attacked for it.