If it wasn’t for the third Black man surviving an overdose, Ed Buck may never have been charged and later convicted in the killing of two Black men. 

Buck, 67, who was a donor to Democratic, LGBT and animal rights causes, was sentenced to 30 years for fatally injecting two Black men, Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean, with drugs. Buck had a fetish for luring gay Black men to his home, injecting them with methamphetamine and exploiting them for sexual favors, according to Yahoo.

In July 2021 a jury found Buck, who lived in California, guilty of all nine charges including enticement to cross state lines to engage in prostitution, maintaining a drug den, distributing meth, and providing the drugs that led to the deaths of two men. In April 2022, he asked a judge to overturn the verdict. 

In court, Buck told the judge that he loved men and wasn’t responsible for the deaths.

“Their deaths were tragic, but I did not cause their deaths,” Buck said, according to NBC News. 

Moore’s mother, LaTisha Nixon, continues to mourn the death of her son. 

She wrote in a letter: “All I can think about is how my son died naked on a mattress with no love around him. No one to hold his hand or tell him good things.”

Prosecutors argued that since Buck preyed on vulnerable, young Black men to please his sexual fetish, he should be given a life sentence. Buck’s attorneys, however, argued for a sentence lower than 25 years so he could “receive rehabilitation,” NBC News reported.