Blacks Shout Ethnic Slurs, Attack Vietnamese in N.Y. : Race: The victims may have been mistaken for Korean-Americans whose store was boycotted. The incident follows an appeal to end bigotry.

A group of black men shouting racial epithets attacked three Vietnamese men they apparently thought were Korean-Americans early Sunday, clubbing one victim with a baseball bat and fracturing his skull.

The incident took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush less than two days after Mayor David N. Dinkins had urged New Yorkers during a major televised speech to reject appeals to bigotry, and less than 2 blocks from two Korean-American grocery stores that have been the target of a black-led boycott since January.

Police investigators were trying to determine whether the incident that left Tuan Ana Cao, 36, in serious but stable condition at Kings County Hospital was racially motivated or an attempted robbery. A police spokesman said that the victims were asked by their attackers what they were doing in the neighborhood and were the subject of ethnic slurs.

The mayor and New York Police Commissioner Lee Brown, who visited Cao in the hospital, said there was no evidence the attack was linked to the boycott of the stores but that racial tension in the area may have contributed to the violence.

“I didn’t expect that I was going to make a speech on Friday night and it (racial tension) was going to end,” Dinkins said.

He denounced the Sunday attack and compared Cao to Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black teen-ager who was shot to death last August in Bensonhurst by members of a white gang. Hawkins was slain after he and two companions entered the predominately Italian-American neighborhood that also is in Brooklyn to answer a newspaper advertisement for a used car.

“Tuan Ana Cao is Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst. He is Michael Griffith in Howard Beach,” the mayor said. Griffith, a 23-year-old black man, was slain in 1986 after being chased by a mob of whites onto a busy highway and struck by a car.

As Dinkins spoke, separate juries in Brooklyn pondered the fates of two 19-year-olds charged with second-degree murder in Hawkins’ slaying. Both juries failed to reach verdicts and will resume deliberations this morning.

In the incident early Sunday, police said that a group of blacks threw a bottle through the front window of an apartment building on Caton Avenue about 2:30 a.m. When Cao and two companions went outside to investigate, they later told detectives, they were attacked by 10 to 15 black men.

“As they tried to escape, one of the men was hit on the head with a baseball bat,” said Anthony Mazzola, a police department spokesman. “The other two said the men in the group had knives and threw bottles at them as they ran away.”

Police said that Cao told them at the hospital that the incident began when four blacks accosted and tried to rob him as he left a nearby subway station.

Dinkins said that the attackers told their victims to get out of America.

“Koreans, what are you doing here!” the mayor said one of the group taunted.

Yvonne Whittaker, a nurse’s aide who lives directly across Caton Avenue from the building where the attack occurred, said that she looked out her front window after hearing a commotion.

“Everyone was shouting. The black guys threw things at them (the Vietnamese). “They threw a crate and it got thrown back at them.”

She said that she saw an object thrown through a front window of the building and soon afterward she saw several men run down the block and turn onto Flatbush Avenue, one of Brooklyn’s busiest shopping streets. Whittaker said that she did not see anyone struck by a baseball bat.

Less than 2 blocks away on Church Avenue, one of the two Korean-owned grocery stores that is being boycotted was open for business Sunday. Before a pelting rain began, a dozen or so picketers marched outside, watched over by a large contingent of police.

The boycott began when a black woman allegedly was assaulted by store employees on Jan. 18. The store’s owners maintain that she had refused to pay the full price of groceries and had to be restrained when she became violent.

Times staff writer David Treadwell contributed to this story.