Democratic party donor and Hillary Clinton supporter Ed Buck has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for supplying dangerous drugs to gay men who died from overdosing.
According to the reports, the 67-year-old Buck was sentenced to a jail term over the deaths of 26-year-old escort Gemmel Moore and 55-year-old porn actor Timothy Dean. The wealthy political donor Ed Buck was convicted for supplying and personally injecting two gay men with methamphetamine in exchange for sex, leading to their deaths due to overdose.
Delivering the verdict on Thursday, the judge came down on Buck for the ‘horrific’ and ‘reprehensible’ crimes but refused to lock him away indefinitely. Buck was last year convicted on charges of injecting the two gay men with methamphetamine.
The judge sentenced Buck to two counts of 30 years in prison, to run concurrently, for distributing methamphetamine resulting in the deaths of Moore and Dean. She also sentenced him to 20 years, to run concurrently for four counts of distributing methamphetamine, two counts of ‘enticement to travel in interstate commerce for prostitution, and one count of maintaining drug-involved premises.
The Hillary Clinton supporter was found guilty of all nine felony counts against him. The verdict came four years after Moore was found dead in Buck’s Hollywood apartment.
In 2017, Gemmel Moore, a 26-year-old homeless sex worker, was found dead on the floor of Ed Buck’s West Hollywood apartment. The evidence suggested that Buck had insisted upon injecting Moore with crystal methamphetamine and had forced him to watch hardcore gay pornography.
Similarly, another black man, Timothy Dean, 55, was found dead in Ed Buck’s home in January 2019.
Soon after the verdict was delivered, the victims’ family and friends burst into tears. Moore’s mother, LaTisha Nixon, said that she had warned her boy to stay away from Ed Buck, adding, “Now all I have is memories and his ashes.”
Joann Campbell, Dean’s sister, said that Buck had taken away her best friend as she demanded the “most severe punishment possible”.
Buck, who donated to former President Barack Obama and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, is a well-known activist in California politics.