(gentle music) - [Narrator] Joel Larson was this beautiful young man who just arrived to Minneapolis.

- [Jennifer] He was somebody that you would notice in a crowd right away, and that you would remember.

I think he really fell in love with the city.

He liked that it was a place that he felt more accepted than he did in Iowa in the late eighties.

I got a call from a very close friend of both of ours, and she told me that Joel had been murdered.

And I remember screaming.

And it was a bit of a blur after that.

I had not been to Loring Park since Joel died.

And I walked to the area where he died, and it seemed very dark and dreary and sad.

And then I turned, and I looked across the expanse of the park, and all of a sudden, it was like he was there with me.

And it popped into my head, this thought of turn your back on hate.

(gentle music) So from the initial thought of that phrase of let us turn our back on hate, teach love, I felt really strongly that I wanted the memorial bench positioned so it faced away from the scene of the crime and faced out across the park.

(gentle music) The actual dedication of the memorial was planned by Joel's sister and her wife, and it was very healing, and that there was a sense of peace and being able to perhaps release a little bit of the grief after all of these years, to know that there was something there that Joel and his story and what happened wouldn't be lost over time.

It's become basically a permanent part of the park, where anybody that comes through there, they're going to wonder, who's Joel Larson?

And just ponder on that thought of, let us turn our backs on hate, teach love.

(gentle music)