Driver Is Attacked After Car Hits 2 Boys : Accident: Some see racial overtones in beating of Latino man in black area of South L.A. Police arrest 4 men.

A Latino immigrant was beaten and badly injured after a traffic accident in South-Central Los Angeles in which his car struck and injured two black children, police said Wednesday.

Members of the man’s family and police said the incident had racial overtones, but relatives of the children and the four men arrested after the beating said their anger was sparked by what they saw as a callous attitude on the part of the driver.

Police said the incident Tuesday shows how easily underlying cultural tensions can erupt into violence--especially in South-Central Los Angeles where large numbers of Latino immigrants have been moving into traditionally black neighborhoods over the last decade.

Police said Guillermo Alvarado, 43, was backing his car out of a parking space behind his apartment building on West Colden Avenue when he accidentally struck a black child, 7-year-old Daveyon James, who was passing by on a skateboard.

Soon, according to police accounts, a group of black men had gathered, at least one of them armed with a broomstick. Racial epithets were uttered. Alvarado panicked, police said, and while trying to escape in his car he struck another black child, pinning the boy against a wall.

When it was all over, four black men were in jail and Alvarado lay in a hospital bed, his face bruised and bloodied, police said. The two boys, who suffered broken bones, were treated in hospitals and released.

Black residents said the beating was sparked not by race as much as anger over the injuries to the two children and the fact that Alvarado seemed not to care. Latino residents were reluctant to discuss the incident, but members of Alvarado’s family said they believe it was racially motivated.

Although it is not uncommon for traffic accidents in Los Angeles to lead to fistfights and shouting matches, police said cultural differences may in fact have been partly responsible for the Colden Avenue accident’s escalating into a beating.

“The neighborhood is changing and those things tend to happen,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Steve Sullivan, who is investigating the case. “You have these black neighborhoods and you have people thinking other people shouldn’t live there.”

With the assistance of police officers Tuesday night, Alvarado’s wife and two children moved out of their apartment.

They had moved into the neighborhood only a month earlier to be closer to the South-Central factory where Alvarado works as a janitor, said Rosa Rodriguez, Alvarado’s wife.

They now are living with Rodriguez’s sister in predominantly Latino East Los Angeles.

“My husband and I are not sure what brought about the beating,” Rodriguez said Wednesday. “I think it was racial. That’s why we moved out.

“All I know is that my family is afraid,” she added, “and we don’t want anything like this to happen again. We came back to East L.A. to stay--permanently.”

Police and witnesses agree that once Alvarado struck Daveyon James, his car continued backing up, with the boy pinned under the car.

Alvarado then struck another child--David Jennings, also 7--and kept going until the car hit the wall of the apartment building, pinning David against it and injuring his leg, police said.

Rodriguez said a group of men, some of them relatives of the two boys, came out of apartment buildings lining Colden Avenue. They ran to the car and began beating Alvarado “with sticks and fists” as he sat in the driver’s seat, Rodriguez said.

According to police, one of the men yelled out “those (expletive) Mexicans” while beating Alvarado with the broomstick and the skateboards of the injured boys. When Rodriguez emerged from her apartment to pull the assailants away from her husband, she was also struck, Detective Sullivan said.

Ever Lou Deal, 48, said the men directed their anger at Alvardo not because he is Latino, but because he did not stop to help the children he had injured.

“He should have stopped the car and got out to see about the child he hit,” said Deal, Daveyon’s grandmother, “Any time you hit a child by accident, you see if he’s O.K. This (man) just kept going.”

Daveyon’s mother, Phyllis Perryman, added: “The little ones who were playing with Daveyon started hollering and screaming at (Alvarado) to stop, so somebody could pull my boy out. “After he hit the second boy, hey, that’s when the trouble started.”

A large crowd had gathered at the scene by the time a police patrol car arrived about 6:30 p.m. Four men--John Childress, 27; Pierre Nutall, 26; Kevin Keys, 28, and Ronnie Rosenthal, 27--were arrested and booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. However, some witnesses questioned whether police had arrested the right men.

Police said they did not pursue charges against Alvarado because they considered the injury of the children to be an accident. However, Sullivan said the district attorney’s office would review the case today.

Daveyon suffered a broken leg and David’s arm was broken.

Alvarado was also hospitalized and later released. Reached at his sister-in-law’s East Los Angeles home, relatives said he could not speak because of his injuries.

Rodriguez said she and her husband cannot speak English fluently. Before Tuesday’s accident, they had little interaction with the non-Spanish-speaking residents in their apartment building.

“Our daughters play together with all the children in the apartment,” she said. “But the older Latino people who can’t speak English, we keep to ourselves.”

Residents of both groups said there have never been any serious conflicts between blacks and Latinos.

“We won’t be starting any mess with each other because of this,” said Roslee Nutall, the wife of one of the arrested men. “The Latino people here will be going about their business, and we’ll be going about ours.”

Times staff writer John Rivera contributed to this story.