"Dennis Shepard spoke too, and it was the hardest part of the morning. His nose was scratched and bruised; he said he'd broken it doing work around the house. He said that he and Matt had had a competition when he was alive; each had broken his nose twice, one pulling ahead of the other and then the other tying it back up. After telling us this, he paused for a long time. He said that when Matt was in the hospital, unconscious, soon to die from the brutal beating he'd sustained, one of his injuries was a broken nose--Matt's third, one more than Dennis. This fresh injury restored the tie. There was something so devastating in it, the nature of his connection to Matt, a connection through visceral pain and broken bones and their infliction."

-- Beth Loffreda, author of Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder blogging on the Columbia University Press blog about the dedication of a park bench in Shepard's memory at the University of Wyoming.