Racism Behind Vandalism, Chino Resident Fears

It was cold when Walter Johnson awoke before dawn last Friday, too cold. With the heater controlled by a timer, his two-story stucco house in the Chino Hills should have been toasty by that hour. Strange, he thought.

Things got stranger still. A check outside revealed that someone had pried open the circuit box and cut power to the home. Vandals had also caused several thousand dollars of damage to his wife’s sports car and to a pair of stretch limousines, the beginnings of a limo leasing business Johnson plans to launch.

Later came a more alarming discovery: The word MOVE and a racial epithet had been scrawled in the dust on the family’s automobiles.

“It’s frightening,” said Johnson, who is blind, in an interview Wednesday. “You go to bed feeling good about your nice, peaceful neighborhood, and you wake up to find this. It kind of killed our Christmas cheer.”

San Bernardino County sheriff’s detectives said they are not convinced that the episode was racially motivated. It could have been the work of a personal enemy, they theorize, or a bunch of bored adolescents pulling a prank.

Johnson, however, disagreed. Suddenly, he said, other incidents that have occurred since the family moved into their Alder Place home in March--the poisoning of the dog, an earlier vehicle break-in, the occasional harassment of his three children by teen-agers shouting racial slurs--appear part of an ominous pattern.

“It all adds up to a message that somebody doesn’t want us” in the mostly white, upscale neighborhood, Johnson said.

“The kids are scared, and I’m nervous,” Johnson, 39, said. “My youngest boy wants to sleep in our room at night, and my oldest won’t take out the trash. What kind of world is this?”

Detective Jim Lingren, the investigator on the case, said the Sheriff’s Department has received no other reports of crimes with racial overtones in suburbs surrounding Chino where the spacious homes are bordered by neatly clipped lawns and hedges.

“We view it as an isolated incident,” Lingren said. “The neighbors I’ve contacted feel very sorry about this. This is not the kind of place you find smoldering crosses on front lawns.”

Lingren said the damage to the Johnsons’ cars “is the classic adolescent stuff, not sophisticated at all.” The antennas on all three vehicles were snapped off, along with side mirrors, windshield wipers and license plates. The hood ornaments were broken, and the seal around one limousine’s sunroof was torn loose.

As for the scrawled message, Johnson said investigators told him one of the words was written in a style associated with skinheads, youths who shave their heads and often espouse racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. Lingren declined to comment on the lettering, citing the ongoing investigation.

While Lingren said investigators are “still looking at the possibility this was an enemy striking back,” Johnson dismissed that hypothesis. “The first thing a blind man learns,” he said, “is you don’t make enemies because you ain’t got a chance against them.”

Moreover, Johnson is convinced that the other incidents--which did not arouse great suspicion at the time they occurred--are related to Friday’s vandalism. Three months ago, he found his Doberman pinscher, Nora, poisoned in the back yard. About the same time, vandals broke into his wife’s car, stealing a camera and some equipment used to label objects in Braille.

More recently, carloads of teen-agers have taunted his children with racial slurs as they walked home from school.

“You start to put these things together, and it looks pretty bad,” Johnson said, shaking his head as his 12-year-old son, Darnell, sat at his side.

Since Friday, the Sheriff’s Department has stepped up patrols in the area, and Johnson has looked into a security system for his home. He has also sought help from the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and local politicians.

Waunidi Changamire, president of the NAACP’s Pomona Valley branch, called the vandalism “appalling” and said her organization will meet with detectives and neighborhood Community Watch leaders to ensure that it is fully investigated.

“We see racial slurs all the time on public buildings, but a personal attack like this is different,” Changamire said. “We hope this isn’t the beginning of a pattern. We intend to have a strong response to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t flourish.”

Johnson said he will stay put and hope for the best.

“I ain’t a track star so I ain’t running,” Johnson said. “If someone has a problem with me, I’d appreciate it if they’d come knock on my door so we can talk about it.”