The last few weeks must have been bittersweet for the family and friends of Ryan Skipper, the fresh-faced 25-year-old student who was killed by a pair of young meth addicts in Polk County, Fla., two years ago because he was gay.

From the moment they were thrust in the spotlight by this deeply personal tragedy, Ryan’s parents, Pat and Lynn Mulder, and his brother, Damien Skipper, have shown the world what grace in the wake of tragedy looks like.

A long and heart-rending chapter in their saga ended on Tuesday when a jury in Polk County found the second suspect in the killing, William “Bill-Bill” Brown, now 23, guilty of first-degree murder. He will be sentenced to life in prison next month. In February, Joe “Smiley” Bearden, now 22, the other suspect, was found guilty and also sentenced to life.

Eight days earlier, on Oct. 28, Damien Skipper and his wife, Tricia, were on hand in Washington when, after a years-long slog through Congress and vitriolic opposition from Republicans, Pres. Obama signed legislation that expands federal hate crimes statutes to cover gay and transgendered people.

After the verdict against Brown, Ryan’s family issued this statement:

We would like to thank the State Attorney’s Office and especially Mr. Castillo for consistently striving to uncover the truth and seek justice for our family and for Ryan. We want to thank the detectives of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office who worked diligently and showed compassion to our family. Thank you to the crime scene technicians whose attention to detail helped uncover the truth. And thank you to everyone else along the way who committed their time and talent to ensuring that justice was served. Lastly, we thank the jurors who have taken time from their jobs and families to fulfill an important civic duty. You paid attention to testimony that was brought before you and rendered a conclusion that serves justice and benefits society.

To the public, we want you to know that Ryan, like so many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, was a good and upstanding member of this community. We all deserve to be judged by our abilities and character instead of our differences. We are all human beings and we all deserve the right to pursue happiness, to have a job, to be parents either naturally or by adoption, to be in a committed loving relationship which is legally recognized, to serve our country in the military openly and honestly with pride. Finally we want the public to know the devastation hate crimes inflict is not only on the individual victim but their families, friends and the entire community feels the impact.

We will always cherish our memories of Ryan. We along with countless others will continue to honor Ryan by always standing up for truth, honesty and equality for all!

You’ll notice in the first paragraph that the family did not include Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, the top law-enforcement officer in charge of the case, among the people they thanked. Nor should they have.

If you haven’t heard about the murder of Ryan Skipper until now, and most people haven’t, the blame for the nationwide, even worldwide, news brown-out about this tragedy, especially in comparison with the coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998, can be placed squarely at the feet of Sheriff Judd — a self-professed right-wing Christian and, judging by his actions, a man apparently so consumed with anti-gay bigotry that he’d be disqualified from public office in a jursdiction where civil rights were valued and protected.

Because of Judd’s professional malpractice — or maybe malfeasance is a better word — it can be said that Ryan Skipper was the victim of not one but three assaults.

First, Brown and Bearden took Ryan’s life because he was gay. Then, during his first news conference about the case, Sheriff Judd smeared Ryan’s character — his reputation and his memory — in a presentation that was filled with errors and disingenuous and deceptive.

Judd’s telling of events went like this. After coming home from an after-work dinner with his boyfriend around 10 p.m., Ryan went out after midnight to cruise the streets seeking anonymous sex. He came upon Bearden, whom he did not know, walking along a road in need of a ride home. Ryan then took Bearden back to his home where, notably, they did not have sex — indulging instead in more chaste pursuits, like smoking pot and conspiring to use Ryan’s computer to forge checks.

Summing up, Judd told reporters, “What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.” Translation: He was looking for trouble and got what he deserved. Judd also took the highly unusual step of releasing the victim’s juvenile arrest record. Ryan had been arrested with a joint on two occasions before he was 18.

But how could Judd assert that his retelling of events was based on “what we do know” when there were no witnesses to the crime other than the alleged perpetrators and a handful of their equally disreputable cohorts? He couldn’t. Judd omitted this key fact: Almost everything in his presentation of the events leading up to the murder was based on statements given investigators by Ryan’s murderers. The meth heads.

It was false that Ryan was cruising for sex. It was also untrue, according to Ryan’s roommate, that Ryan brought Bearden home that night. As to forging checks, everyone who knew him agreed that for Ryan, that sort of thing was far outside his comfort zone. And the computer in question was never in his house; it was a friend’s broken laptop he’d offered to fix and then stashed in the back seat of his car.

A spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office later released a statement claiming that Judd hadn’t meant to imply that Ryan conspired to forge checks or that he’d done anything illegal. Much later a senior officer in the department acknowledged that Judd’s presentation had been based on the killers’ statements. The sheriff has never apologized to Ryan’s family for the outrageous and needlessly hurtful smears.

As has been noted here before, even if it were true that Ryan had been “looking for someone to pick up” — and it was not — it was, at best, unprofessional for Sheriff Judd to offer his take on a murder victim’s behavior. At worst, as a father and family man, Grady Judd’s smearing Ryan that day comes off as cruel and heartless. As a Christian, it was hypocritical, if not downright sinful, to be casting stones at anyone.

After Judd’s moralizing at the news conference, Ryan’s character was subjected to yet another massive assault — this time from the media. First, it had to have been obvious to every reporter in the room that Judd’s sourcing lacked credibility. How obvious? A big clue was Judd’s flatly stating that Bearden and Ryan did not have sex when they purportedly went back to Ryan’s house. Judd certainly did not learn that from Ryan, and Ryan’s roommate denied Bearden was ever in her house.

(Pensito Review editor Trish Ponder was not at the news conference, but was immediately suspicious when the first reports came across her desk. Her first story about the case, dated March 18, 2007, was titled, Blaming the Victim: Portrayal of Florida Man Killed for Being Gay Doesn’t Ring True.)

Instead of doing their jobs, the local reporters behaved like stenographers, dutifully and unquestioningly typing up Judd’s homophobic version of events and then publishing it via the Internet to the world. As Brian Winfield at Equality Florida later put it, “They’ve characterized Ryan as a pervert, a drug addict and a felon. In the eyes of the media, it didn’t carry the human interest that it should have.”

That’s how the story was reported by the Associated Press, and from there it was repeated far and wide, even in the gay media. Not surprisingly, within a single news cycle, the story simply died.

And Sheriff Judd’s handiwork lives on. As this is being written three days after Brown’s trial ended, the Advocate, the nation’s leading gay news magazine, has not reported that Ryan’s second killer was found guilty. (However, Towleroad has.)

There’s nothing in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times or the Washington Post. A quick search of Google News, however, finds links to the AP via Miami Herald as well as stories in the Lakeland Ledger, On Top Magazine and UPI (the news service owned by the “Moonie” cult, Unification Church).

It’s clear now that Sheriff Judd will never apologize for his actions, and that he’ll never by held accountable by Florida’s Republican-controlled justice department or by Polk County voters.

As it is with every murder trial, finally obtaining justice for Ryan can only be cold comfort for his family, who’d much rather have him back among them than see these two damaged young men behind bars for the rest of their lives. Still, let’s hope Pat, Lynn, Damien, Tricia and everyone who knew and loved Ryan will rest a little easier now that his killers are behind bars, even as their fight — our fight — against anti-gay violence goes on.