President says university student, 21, who died days after being tied to a fence and beaten, was murdered ‘simply for being himself’

Joe Biden has marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay 21-year-old University of Wyoming student who died six days after he was beaten by two young men, tied to a fence, burned and abandoned in a remote part of the state.

Shepard’s death has long been memorialized as a hate crime that helped fuel the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Lamenting “a brutal act of hate and violence that shocked our nation and the world”, Biden, in a statement on Thursday, said Shepard was murdered “simply for being himself”.