$5,000 Offered for Arrest of Racists Who Harassed Interracial Family

The Fair Housing Congress of Southern California and the Westside Fair Housing Council offered a $5,000 reward Wednesday for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution of the criminals responsible for the racist harassment that drove an interracial couple from their Westchester home.

Tori and Robson Dufau moved from their trim stucco home on West 79th Street in May. They had endured six months of insults, threats, vandalism and finally the shooting of a pet rabbit in their backyard. They had resisted, determined not to give in.

But in the end, concern for their two children, David, 5, her son by an earlier marriage, and 16-month-old Robson Jr., was decisive. To pass the word of the reward, a press conference was held in the state attorney general’s office on Wilshire Boulevard. Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp called for stiffer criminal penalties for hate mongers. The Dufaus were there.

Tori Dufau, a black 26-year-old school nurse, and her 23-year-old white husband told reporters that they had not expected trouble when they accepted a friend’s invitation to lease the Westchester home with an option to buy. They moved in last October and the harassment began in November.

“This is 1986. . . . I knew there was prejudice, but I didn’t expect it to come knocking on my door,” said Robson Dufau, who bought a gun, rigged an alarm system over his front door and instructed David to play only in the backyard.

The killing of David’s pet rabbit in April climaxed an anonymous campaign of crude white supremacist insults in the mail, messages taped to the front door and finally a threatening letter that said, “If you stay, you pay.”

Tori Dufau said she and her husband could not subject David to the pressure demonstrated, she said, when the boy asked a white dental receptionist to be his mother so that the trouble would end.

“It’s gotten him confused,” she said. “He now feels it’s not OK to be black.”

Even after the family moved to a new neighborhood where there is no sign of racial troubles, David is showing the effects of his experience, according to his mother.

Recently, she said, she and David were watching a television program matching a white woman and a black woman in a price-guessing game. The white contestant won.

“My son said to me, ‘You know why she won, mom, don’t you?’ ” Tori Dufau said. “I thought it was coming, but I didn’t give in to it. So, I just listened and said, ‘She won because she got the best price.’

She said her son replied, “No, mom, that’s not why. It’s because she’s white.”

Despite their experience, Tori Dufau said she is not embittered. But she is not ready to forgive and forget either. She called on the public for help in identifying whoever was responsible for the campaign against her family.

Van de Kamp told reporters that an investigation conducted by Special Agent Jack Richards has developed “important” information.

“We can now conclude, for example, that many of the crimes were the work of the same group of individuals--possibly even one person,” he said. “We are hopeful that the offer of a reward will produce information that leads to their arrest, prosecution and conviction.”

Van de Kamp said his office became involved in the Dufau case in May under the Ralph Civil Rights Act of the California Civil Code, which makes it illegal to intimidate anyone by threat of violence because of race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation or position in a labor dispute.