Matthew Shepard’s mom calls anti-LGBTQ bills a ‘vicious attack’ 25 years after his murder

Judy Shepard said she expected the climate for LGBTQ people to be better than it was 25 years ago, when her son Matthew was killed, but it’s not.

“They’re still being denied basic rights, the community is, and the absolute outward showing of hate again, it’s just infuriating to me,” Shepard said in an exclusive interview with Katie Couric on NBC’s “TODAY” show.

On Oct. 6, 1998, Matthew, a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, went to an LGBTQ resource group meeting to plan a Coming Out Day event, and afterward he went to a bar, according to his father, Dennis. While there, Matthew met two men who pretended to be gay and invited him to a party in order to lure him out of the bar and to a remote area where they beat him, tied him to a fence and left him for dead. Matthew died in the hospital on Oct. 12, and his death drew national attention to anti-LGBTQ violence and fueled the fight for hate crime legislation, which provides additional penalties for bias-motivated crimes.