Santa Ana : Local News in Brief : Cross-Burning Suspect Says He Was Bystander

A Westminster man accused of burning a cross in a black family’s yard acknowledged to police a few days after the July 28 incident that he took part in the cross-burning but insisted that he had only followed the lead of his friends, according to court documents filed by prosecutors.

Gary A. Skillman, 23, being held in Terminal Island federal prison on a federal charge of violating the family’s civil rights, is the only person charged in the cross burning.

Skillman told police in an interview released Friday that he only watched as his friends--all reputed skinheads--built the cross in his garage, doused it with gasoline, planted it in the yard of a black family down the street and set it afire.

Skillman quoted a friend as saying, “We’re gonna stick it in a (epithet)’s yard.”

Skillman told police in the interview: “I didn’t have nothing to do with the sticking it in there and lighten (sic) it or nothing. I just followed (his friend).”

Federal prosecutors offered the police interview in court papers filed Friday, in advance of a hearing scheduled next week in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana.

They will try to dissuade a federal judge from granting a motion by Skillman’s attorneys to exclude several statements and some physical evidence that police got from Skillman.