Beating of O.C. Girl Compared to Bensonhurst

Outraged over the Aug. 6 attack on a Garden Grove cheerleader that they believe was racially motivated, black activists Friday condemned the handling of the case by local auhorities and warned that it could become a “Bensonhurst West.”

Fifteen-year-old Amber Jefferson, who is black, should have been at her first cheerleading performance Friday. Instead, with her jaw wired shut and the side of her face stitched together, she sat silently in a Yorba Linda church, surrounded by black activists and the growing racial storm that her attack has ignited.

Calling the criticism premature, authorities on Friday repeated pledges to fully explore allegations that the girl was badly beaten by several whites wielding bats and shouting racial slurs. But the black activists nonetheless promised candlelight vigils, church meetings and a possible appeal to the state for an independent investigation in coming weeks to vent their frustration.

“The sheriff’s handling of this case is tantamount to tolerating racial violence, which could very well lead to even worse incidents,” said Mark Ridley-Thomas, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles at a press conference at Friendship Baptist Church.

“Southern California does not need, nor should it invite, a situation that would be branded nothing less than ‘Bensonhurst West,’ ” Ridley-Thomas said, flanked by local and state officials from the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups involved in black civic affairs.

Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood, became a symbol of racial violence last year after a black teen-ager, shopping for a used car, was attacked and killed there by a white gang.

In the Orange County case, the racial elements in the attack are still in dispute, with criminal charges recommended but not yet filed against anyone.

“I’m disappointed that (the critics) would prejudge this case,” Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi said Friday. “What happened to Amber is obviously tragic, but it’s our responsibility to deal with it in a professional manner, not an emotional one, and this case has got our attention at our highest levels.”

Assistant Sheriff Dennis LaDucer said of the critics: “We would hope that as the facts of this case become known in the appropriate setting--the courtroom--they will develop confidence in the intensity and thoroughness of our efforts.”

What is known so far is that Amber was badly beaten and slashed with a piece of broken glass outside a Stanton apartment complex during a midnight brawl that involved more than a dozen people--on one side, mostly white teen-agers and a 42-year-old man; on the other, Amber and several black, white and Latino teen-agers.

Some among the white group under investigation maintain that the fight was not about race but was prompted by a jilted girl. Amber, by all accounts, was not involved in the argument that triggered the fight. But somehow, in the end, she was slashed with a piece of glass that left a deep gash on the side of her face, and her jaw was broken, allegedly by a bat-wielding participant.

One 19-year-old woman at the center of the dispute acknowledged in an interview this week that she shouted “nigger” in the midst of the fighting. But she said her words were directed not at Jefferson, whose father is black and mother is white, but at a white teen-ager whom she considered “stupid.”

Earl Wimberly of Stanton, a 42-year-old construction worker whose role in the attack is under investigation, watched television news reports of the coalition’s press conference and declared afterward, “Those people lie.”

“I just don’t think it’s right,” he said. “Why are they pushing this so far to make it a racial thing?”

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department said initially that it was not investigating the incident as a racial attack.

But under intense criticism from local activists, the department on Tuesday recommended to the district attorney’s office that it use a three-year old state “hate-crime” law, for racially motivated attacks, against three of Amber’s alleged assailants. It also recommended a host of other assault and criminal charges against up to a dozen participants on both sides of the fight.

But the activists, responding specifically to the Sheriff’s Department’s recommendations, said they were not satisfied. At the press conference, they questioned why some “victims” among Jefferson’s group are under investigation, and charged that authorities have effectively set up a “smoke screen” because of the victim’s race. Several also said they feared that the district attorney’s office would “dump” the case on a grand jury in order to further stall prosecution, a prospect that Capizzi would not discuss.

“What I can’t understand is how a 15-year-old girl could have her face slashed so bad by someone so vicious,” Amber’s father, William, said as he fought back tears. “If this is not a crime or an attack on a minority race, why did she have to get hurt so bad?”

The father also suggested that if the victim in the attack had been white and her attackers black, “someone would be in jail.”

Declared Jose DeSosa, state president of the NAACP: “Racial hatred was there.”

Press conference organizers declined a request from among the more than two dozen media representatives to talk with Amber, who leaned occasionally on her mother for support as she watched the speakers in silence.

Even with surgery, it could be months before Amber returns to school and years before she regains full movement on the left side of her face, her family says. For now, said her mother, Cody Donnelly, she takes food through a straw and tries to cope with the emotional trauma of an attack that she does not fully remember.

“The nightmares are the worst,” her mother said Friday. “But we hope what these people were doing for us today will do some good.”