I don’t recognize “hate crimes”. That’s a neologism that the left made up in order to undermine the concept of equal protection of the laws.
I understand where you are coming from there. Ideally, there should be no such phrase as "hate crime" in the law books. If a crime happens to be motivated by hate, it should be considered as an exacerbating factor at sentencing after conviction.
But in the real world, in the New York criminal code, "hate crime" is a legitimate term, and that's what I was referring to. Unfortunately, unless this dead perp had friends who aided him in this, we will never see a legal proceeding in this case where the motivation will be made public.