3 Whites Charged in Queens Mob Attack

Three white teen-agers were charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and assault Monday in connection with the weekend mob attack on three blacks leaving a pizzeria. One of the three victims was killed as he fled across a nearby parkway into the path of an oncoming car.

An enraged Mayor Edward I. Koch on Monday likened the attack to “lynching parties that existed in the Deep South.” The mayor said that Michael Griffith, 23, the construction worker who was killed, and his friends were “chased as if they were quarry on a hunt.”

A fourth youth was arrested and released later, pending further investigation. Detectives also questioned seven other young people--six youths whose ages range from 16 to 18 and a 14-year-old girl. Meanwhile, blacks packed into 30 cars decorated with green ribbons drove to the pizzeria in the predominantly white Howard Beach section of Queens. The protesters filled the restaurant and shouted, “We shall overcome!” and “I am somebody!”

‘Most Horrendous’ Violence

Koch called the crime “the most horrendous incident of violence” since he became mayor in 1977.

Police said the victims and two other men were on their way to collect their paychecks Friday night when their car broke down in Howard Beach, a working-class community of about 18,000 adjacent to John F. Kennedy Airport. Three of the men--Griffith, Cedric Sandiford, 36, and Timothy Grimes, 18--walked to the pizzeria to make a phone call. They found no phone, but stayed to have pizza.

As they left the restaurant, Sandiford said, three cars pulled up and about 10 teen-agers, some of them carrying baseball bats and tree limbs, got out.

Sandiford said their “intention was to kill . . . It was like a lynch mob . . . like something that would happen in the days of slavery.

“They said, ‘Nigger, you’re in the wrong neighborhood.’ I was hollering, ‘God, don’t kill us!’ ” he said.

Companion Hit by Car

Grimes was struck once, and Sandiford suffered injuries to his head, back and arms. Griffith climbed through a hole in a fence and tried to run across the Belt Parkway, where he was struck and killed by a car operated by Dominick Blum, 24, a court officer. Blum was not charged.

Police said the youths who were charged were attending a party in the neighborhood. They said three teen-agers who were at the party had left and had seen the three blacks at the pizzeria; words were exchanged, the whites returned to the party and came back with their friends, police said.

“This is nothing less than a lynching here,” said Benjamin Ward, police commissioner.

Detectives, working with the cooperation of Howard Beach residents, later arrested Jason Ladone, 16, and Scott Kern and John Lester, both 17.

To guard against further violence, police assigned extra officers Monday to the neighborhood around the pizza parlor.

“This is the worst murder that I believe has taken place in the modern era of the city,” Koch said, noting that about 1,800 killings take place in New York each year.