- The 17-year-old charged in the fatal stabbing of dancer O'Shae Sibley pleaded not guilty to all charges on Friday.
- Dmitriy Popov's attorney said his client will likely make a self-defense argument.
A teenager charged with murder as a hate crime in the fatal stabbing of dancer O'Shae Sibley pleaded not guilty on Friday and will likely argue that the killing was an act of self-defense, the teen's attorney told reporters at a news conference.
Dmitriy Popov, 17, was indicted on nine counts in total, including second-degree murder as a hate crime, second-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime, criminal possession of a weapon. He is being charged as an adult.
"Once I get all the evidence, I strongly suspect that we will be going self-defense, and that he had a reasonable grounds to reasonably believe that he had to defend himself in this situation," Popov's attorney, Mark Pollard, said Friday after Popov's arraignment.
The fatal altercation began on the evening of July 29 when Sibley, a 28-year-old professional dancer, had been vogueing to a Beyoncé song with his friends while stopped for gas at a Brooklyn gas station. NYPD officials said while Sibley and his friends were dancing, a group of males confronted them and demanded they stop dancing.
"As this group began to yell at Mr. Sibley and his friends, they began to call him derogatory names and use homophobic slurs against him," Joseph Kenny, an assistant chief at the NYPD's detective bureau, said last week.
Kenny said that the group of males also used "anti-Black" language while confronting Sibley and his friends.
The altercation lasted roughly four minutes, rapidly moving from verbal to physical conflict, and ended when the perpetrator retreated from Sibley while striking him with a sharp object. Sibley was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
In response to reporters' questions on Friday, Pollard said his client regrets the incident.
"He regrets what happens, he certainly does. But that doesn't mean that he's guilty of a crime," Pollard said.