Students perform play based on hate crime By NAOMI L. JENKINS Bucks County Courier Times Middletown - Matthew Shepard, 21, had been a University of Wyoming student for only a few months when he was the victim of a hate crime in 1998. Few in the town of Laramie knew him as well as his former roommate and good friend Romaine Patterson. The two previously lived together in Denver. She talked publicly about Shepard, who was gay, for three minutes at a vigil the day after he died - five days after the attack. "Once I got up and spoke...