The wealthy political activist and Democratic donor Ed Buck was sentenced to 30 years in prison on charges that he supplied and personally injected gay men with methamphetamine in exchange for sex, leading to two deaths and multiple other overdoses.
Buck, 67, was found guilty in July by a federal jury on all nine counts, including having a drug house, distributing methamphetamine and enticing men to travel for prostitution.
Thursday’s sentencing closes a long saga, involving Buck, who prosecutors say used his wealth and influence to prey on and exploit mostly vulnerable Black men for “party and play” encounters at his West Hollywood apartment. The encounters involved Buck paying men to use drugs, injecting large amounts and performing sex acts on them. Officials said Buck would inject methamphetamine with or without the men’s consent and sometimes when they were unconscious.
“Buck used his money and privilege to exploit the wealth and power imbalances between himself and his victims, who were unhoused, destitute, and/or struggling with addiction,” said Chelsea Norell, an assistant US attorney, in a court filing. “He spent thousands of dollars on drugs and party and play sessions that destroyed lives and bred insidious addictions.”
Gemmel Moore, 26, fatally overdosed at Buck’s West Hollywood apartment in July 2017. A second man, Timothy Dean, 55, died nearly two years later in 2019 from a fatal overdose of methamphetamine at Buck’s home. It wasn’t until a third man overdosed twice at the apartment that Buck was arrested and charged. All three men were Black.
Relatives and activists had pushed for Buck’s arrest since Moore died. They have said Buck escaped criminal charges for years because of his wealth, political ties and race.
Buck, who was nicknamed “Doctor Kevorkian”, had at least 10 victims and would sometimes drug them while they were unconscious, according to court filings. One victim said he was “unable to move” after Buck injected him with a tranquilizer. He added that later when Buck wanted him to leave his home, Buck “became frustrated and obtained a power saw from a closet, turned it on, and approached [the] victim with it”.
Prosecutors urged the judge to sentence Buck to life in prison, saying that he used “human beings as playthings, destroying their lives merely to appease his own sexual gratification”. Buck’s attorneys sought a 10-year sentence, rather than “relegating him to death in prison”. They asked the judge to consider Buck’s drug addiction, which they said he developed because of a medical condition, and the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his father and several priests.
LaTisha Nixon, Moore’s mother, said in a letter to the court that she hoped Buck would receive the maximum sentence. Nixon, a certified nursing assistant, said she could not comfort her son the way she has for countless dying people.
“All I can think about is how my son died naked on a mattress with no love around him,” Nixon said. “No one to hold his hand or tell him good things.”
Buck asked for leniency before he was sentenced, telling the court: “I ask that the court take a look at my life in total,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times, rather than “the horrible caricature the government painted me as: a meth-fueled axe killer”.
Buck, a wealthy white man who was active in gay causes and animal rights issues has given more than $500,000, mostly to Democratic politicians and causes since 2000.
Black LGBTQ+ activists in California had been advocating for years for Buck to be brought to justice and accused police of ignoring their concerns and allowing Buck to continue hurting people. Buck continued to prey on gay men after Moore’s death, even complaining about the investigation to Dean, who would later die in his home.
“Buck’s lack of remorse is aptly captured in one image: as he was hiding out in a hotel, evading arrest for Gemmel Moore’s death, he was injecting Dane Brown, another young Black man, with back-to-back slams of methamphetamine,” Norell said.
Brown, who was homeless, moved into Buck’s apartment, where Buck frequently injected him with meth, often several times a day. He was hospitalized in September 2019 after Buck shot him up three times with back-to-back doses, putting five times the meth in his system that Moore and Dean had when they died, prosecutors said.
Brown returned to Buck’s home weeks later where Buck again injected him with an overdose of methamphetamine, and refused to help him, he said.
“Brown sat on the couch, resigned to the same fate as Moore and Dean, when he heard his deceased mother cry out to him, ‘Get up, Dane,’” Norell said.
He escaped Buck’s home and made it to a nearby gas station, where he called for help and was taken to a hospital. His harrowing account of being revived twice finally led to Buck’s arrest.