Fight With Suspected ‘Skinheads’ Retold

A Glendora couple testified in court Monday that four people who looked like “skinheads” assaulted them in a supermarket parking lot in May after one of the men with a shaved head screamed, “White power, white rule!”

But an attorney for a 21-year-old Yorba Linda man and three others charged in the attack called the encounter “just a parking lot argument” and said the defendants had been mislabeled as skinheads.

The testimony came in the opening day of a preliminary hearing for William Killackey, 21, of Yorba Linda; Killackey’s sister, Amy, 19, of West Covina; Scott Robert Wilson, 28, of West Covina, and Timothy Robert Zaal, 25, of Glendora.

All four are charged with felony assault and violation of the state’s civil rights law.

Wilson is being held after failing to post bail. The other three are free on $50,000 bail.

Manochehr Sadri said he was inside a supermarket in La Verne on a Sunday afternoon when a man at the entrance raised his right arm and screamed, “White power, white rule!”

Sadri testified at Pomona Municipal Court that he and his wife then left the market, but the four continued to scream racial epithets at them near the store entrance.

As he and his wife were pushing a shopping cart and their 2-month-old baby through the parking lot toward their car, the group followed them and attacked them near the vehicle, Sadri testified.

Sadri, 30, and his wife, Farzaneh, 28, told the court that they were speaking in Persian when they heard themselves being mocked. One of the men, Farzaneh Sadri said, “was making fun of our accent” and apparently thought they were Jewish.

She said one man made an anti-Semitic remark about her child.

The name-calling, they testified, led to an assault in which he was kicked and beaten and she was punched in the face. Manochehr Sadri suffered minor injuries.

Attorney Ted H. Meeder Jr., who represents Zaal, said the defendants have been mislabeled as neo-Nazi skinheads.

He said Zaal--whom Sadri identified as the man who shouted, “White power, white rule!”--is not a member of any political group.

“It was just a parking lot argument,” said Meeder, who added that the defendants had stopped at the store to get food for a barbecue after attending a benefit concert for the homeless, at which they had picked up some “White Power” cards that were being passed out.

In court Monday, two of the defendants wore business suits, and the men had short-cropped hair. The female defendant wore a navy-blue dress.

But Sadri said the defendants were dressed much differently during the parking lot encounter: Two of them were shirtless and had tattoos, and all wore their hair so short that it appeared that their heads had been shaved.

He said Amy Killackey and Wilson wore what appeared to be “combat boots.”

Sadri said the assault began when Wilson tried to kick him. Sadri said he grabbed Wilson’s leg, and both men ended up on the ground, struggling for eight or nine minutes.

During the scuffle, he testified, he was repeatedly kicked and hit on the head.