By Michael Ratliff

Police have captured the second suspect involved in a hate crime that left a Queens man in critical condition for five days.

On Oct. 8, at 4:30 a.m., Jack Price, 49, was walking home after buying cigarettes at his local deli on the corner of College Point Boulevard and 118th Avenue. Two men approached him and shouted anti-gay slurs. Price, who is openly gay, verbally defended himself only to be jumped by the two men. Price staggered home and phoned the police after suffering a lacerated spleen, broken ribs and a fractured jaw.

Daniel Aleman, 26, was apprehended on Sunday and held on charges of aggravated assault as a hate crime. His accomplice, Daniel Rodriguez, 21, was arrested on Tuesday in Norfolk, Va., police said.

Price was a regular at the deli, according to a clerk working there on Tuesday night. A group of four cigarette-smoking loiterers outside claimed to know Rodriquez and his whereabouts, but were chased off by the store clerk before providing any details.

Police documented five hate murders in 2008 in New York compared to three in 2007. According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, there were 169 documented hate-related assaults in the City in 2008, a 22 percent rise from 2007. Perpetrators tended to be males between the ages of 19 and 29, and often attacked in groups of two or more, the group said.

The attack on Price has alarmed the gay community and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy co-sponsored a forum on Tuesday night to discuss the incident and others in recent months. Thirty people, including three police community affairs officers, filled the hall at the Queens Pride House in Jackson Heights.

“The crime was part of a larger pattern of bias across the city,” said Pauline Park, the chair of the association. “It can happen anywhere.”

Park also announced that Price had woken from his medically induced coma and that a surveillance video of the attack had surfaced.

The event was scheduled to create a safer community for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Queens. Carmella Etienne, 23, spoke about how she felt last July when seven men barraged her with slurs, beer bottles and rocks as she walked home in St. Albans.

“I felt like I was in prison in my own house,” she said about the lingering fear afterwards. But then she added on a more hopeful note, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Two of Etienne’s attackers were caught and tried under the New York Hate Crimes Act of 2000, which carries a more severe punishment for crimes that single victims out based on personal traits like race, age or sexual orientation.

A rally will be held in College Point on Oct. 17 at 2:00 p.m. to protest hate violence and homophobia.

Price was attacked after exiting this Deli on Oct. 8, source Michael Ratliff (Top above)

Daniel Rodriguez, 21, source NYPD (Bottom above)