Metzger Must Pay $5 Million in Rights Death

In what could be a major setback to the growing white supremacist movement, a jury Monday awarded $12.5 million to the family of a black man beaten to death by skinheads allegedly incited by Tom Metzger and his organization, the White Aryan Resistance.

The award was the maximum sought in the lawsuit brought by a team led by civil rights attorney Morris Dees.

Tom Metzger was ordered to pay $5 million. His son John was ordered to pay $1 million. WAR was assessed $3 million, two skinheads who pleaded guilty in the slaying must pay $500,000 each. The five defendants will split the responsibility for the remaining $2.5 million awarded by the jury.

Dees and his team had predicted that if they were victorious in the civil suit, Metzger’s growing racist network headquartered in Fallbrook, Calif., would be broken.

The jury deliberated about five hours before reaching the verdict on an 11-1 vote. The jurors declined comment as they left the courthouse.

After the verdict was announced, Dees said “this jury has spoken loud and clear that in this country the 1st Amendment guarantees the right to hate people and say whatever you want. But it does not give you the right to hurt people.”

The verdict “will clean (Metzger’s) clock,” he said. “Whatever assets he’s got, it won’t be enough to satisfy this judgment, and we are going to get it all. This first thing we’re going to do is send a moving van to his house so we can take it over. This WAR organization has really only been a cash cow for Tom and John Metzger and any more cash funds that come in we’re going to be at the mailbox to pick up those checks.”

Metzger told reporters that he considered the verdict a victory because it will make him a martyr to white America.

“Persecution sometimes opens the door,” he said. “We are telling the white underclass that is growing out there that this kind of thing is coming to their door next. Everything is heating up.

“Morris Dees made a fatal mistake,” he said. “I think he shot himself in the foot.”

Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, sought to prove that the Metzgers sent agents to Portland to organize a group of East Side White Pride skinheads.

Three members of that gang have been convicted in the November, 1988, slaying of Mulugeta Seraw, a 27-year-old Ethiopian immigrant living in Portland. He was attacked by the trio as he returned home from a party. His head was split open by a baseball bat. The Metzgers were never criminally charged in the murder.

Dees fashioned the lawsuit after his battle with the Alabama arm of the Ku Klux Klan, in which he won a $7-million jury award in 1987 after a black youth was lynched in Mobile.

Tom Metzger, 52, has emerged in recent years as a national white power leader through his success recruiting disaffected white youths who are active as skinheads in about 100 U.S. cities. John Metzger, 22, is WAR’s national director for its skinhead faction.

Both father and son represented themselves at the trial. In his closing, Tom Metzger called the two-week trial a “Salem witch hunt.” Metzger said that a verdict against him would merely further his cause by endearing his reputation among skinheads and other advocates of a whites-only America.

“Do you want to make me a martyr?” he shouted, standing before the jury and spreading his arms in the shape of a crucifix. “Because that’s what it would seem like to tens of thousands of people, maybe more.”

Metzger told jurors that if he is found liable, their own freedoms could be eroded. As an example, he said a juror could be sued for sending a co-worker out for coffee if that person then held up a convenience store.

“Under this loose idea of agency, you’re all in trouble,” he said.

Key testimony for the plaintiffs came from Dave Mazzella, former vice president of the skinheads’ Aryan Youth Movement and a Metzger devotee from Southern California. He told the jury that he was specifically dispatched by the Metzgers to Portland to incite skinheads here to violence, including those later convicted in the Seraw death.

He testified that he called the Metzgers as soon as he arrived in Portland, and called them again the day after the murder.

Dees also produced WAR bank records for 1988 and 1989, showing a co-mingling of Tom Metzger’s personal funds and those belonging to WAR. As much as $14,000 in WAR receipts were deposited to his Fallbrook TV repair shop, and WAR money also paid for his doctor bills and his $100 hairpiece.

“This fella’s running him a business, making money off it, and he’s not even ashamed of it,” Dees told the jury on Friday.

But Metzger scoffed at the suggestion that he, his son or WAR are wealthy. “I’m living in the low-rent district,” he said.

His Fallbrook, Calif., home is worth only $90,000, he said, and WAR is nothing more than a few phones and a copier machine.

Throughout the trial, Tom Metzger claimed that his WAR newspaper, his telephone hot line messages and his cable television programs--all of which advocate violence toward minorities and Jews--are protected under the 1st Amendment right to free speech.

Tom Metzger said he never gave Mazzella specific orders to teach skinheads to kill anyone.

Elden Rosenthal, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in his rebuttal that the 1st Amendment wasn’t the issue.

“We have no evidence that Tom or John Metzger said, ‘Go kill Mulugeta Seraw.’ We’re not required to prove that,” he told the jury.

He said the plaintiffs had proven that the Metzgers and Mazzella conspired to create random acts of violence “and the fact that in one of those random incidents a man died, and that’s why we’re here.”

Judge Ancer L. Haggerty, a black conservative and Vietnam War hero whom Tom Metzger has ridiculed in his WAR hot lines as an “Uncle Tom,” advised the jury of nine men and three women that the 1st Amendment “protects the person’s right to advocate the abstract need for violence sometime in the indefinite future. But it does not allow a person to prepare a group for violent action and spur it on to such action in the immediate or near future.”

There was no audible reaction in the heavily guarded courtroom when the verdict was announced. The victim’s 9-year-old-son, Henock Seraw, sat quietly in Dees’ lap as the jury filed in.

Dees said later that “what bothers me more about Tom Metzger is that in the last year he has become more and more violent. He’s training with AK-47s out in the California desert, so I believe that pretty soon you’re going to see this man snap. He’s got his back cornered and pretty soon you’re going to see him do something really stupid.”

Metzger said he would continue to practice with AK-47s “and anything else that is legal.”

“I’m broke. I can advocate violence now. Nobody can get me anymore,” he said.

The trial here follows two setbacks last week for white power advocates. Two white teen-age skinheads were found guilty in Reno, Nev., of first-degree murder in the drive-by shooting of a 27-year-old black man. And three white supremacists were convicted in Boise, Ida., for plotting to bomb a Seattle disco frequented by homosexuals.