DETROIT – Demarro McMurray was in his Wayne State University dorm room trying to file a police report over an alleged hate crime that had happened a few days before.
While he was on the phone a group of girls showed up and things escalated quickly.
"They break in, try to interfere with him trying to make a police report, they do everything wrong and yet Demarro is the one who's sitting behind the defendant's table being prosecuted," said his attorney Dana Nessel.
During the pre-trial hearing, McMurray focused on the attorneys while a former friend told the courtroom what happened during a fight in his dorm room.
"He picked me up and slammed me on the bed and started choking me. When I told him I couldn't breathe, he was like, 'Oh you can't breathe?' And he started choking me harder," the victim said.
The victim says she wanted to check up on McMurray and that he told the girls to leave. In her statement she told police she then heard McMurray on the phone talking to an officer.
The three girls started banging on his door.
"You call him a (expletive)?" asked attorney Chris Kessel.
After repeating the question again with different derogatory slurs, Kessel asked: "You're not doing any of those things while you're banging on the door?"
"Um no," she replied.
McMurray says he was the victim of hate crime a few days earlier, perpetrated by a friend of the girls. He said he was bullied because he's gay.
"And that's what's hurtful the most is that someone who claimed to support me and been accepting of my lifestyle turned on me, just like anyone else who hurt me in my life," McMurray said outside court.
While acknowledging LGBT rights, the prosecution says it is irrelevant if the girls allegedly yelled homophobic slurs or made their way into his dorm room.
"Those allegations are not enough to justify a strangulation your Honor," said the prosecutor.
The victim's two friends had to pull McMurray off the victim and said that at one point her face turned blue.
The defense tried to downplay the incident and the injuries pointing out the girls posted a video of themselves laughing in the squad car and took selfies at the police station.
In a statement, Wayne State said they were distressed by the allegations of a hate crime and that after a thorough investigation they found no evidence a hate crime had been committed.
McMurray was expelled and the victim was suspended for violating the school's code of conduct.