Metzger Remains Mystery to Fallbrook Neighbors : Racist: $12-million judgment on him and followers again puts his hometown in unwanted limelight.

It was just after 5 in the morning when Tomasa Covarrubias heard the moving van outside her Fallbrook home, backing its way down the road to the house of her infamous neighbor, white supremacist Tom Metzger.

She leaned out the window and silently watched as the figures moved to and from the van in the predawn shadows. Who in their right mind moves furniture before the sun comes up?

For Covarrubias and other neighbors, the Tuesday morning scene was just another puzzling chapter in the story of Fallbrook’s mystery man.

He’s the 52-year-old local repairman who fixed televisions and VCRs for residents in his largely Hispanic neighborhood while heading a white supremacist organization that advocates violence against Latinos and other minorities.

He’s also the former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who once made a run for Congress. But for the residents of dead-end Sunbeam Road, he’s always been a recluse who offered little insight into his notorious personal life.

“Over the years, there’s been a lot of strange things that have gone on at that house down the road,” said Minerva Covarrubias, daughter of Tomasa Covarrubias. “That whole family has been a mystery to most people in this town. It gets to the point where you don’t ask questions about what you see outside your window. You just don’t talk about it.”

By Tuesday morning, all around this rustic town of 9,000 residents about 50 miles north of San Diego, people were talking once again about Metzger the Mystery Man, Fallbrook’s native son gone bad.

They talked about him at the gas station pumps and in the check-out lines at the local grocery store. They talked about him in the Red Eye Saloon and at the counter of Harrison’s Drug Store.

On Monday, a Portland, Ore., jury decided that Metzger and his followers should pay $12.5 million to the family of a black man beaten to death by a group of skinheads allegedly incited to violence by Metzger and his organization, the White Aryan Resistance.

All around Metzger’s adopted hometown, people expressed surprise at the size of the judgment. They talked about whether Tom Metzger was really guilty: Did he order those Portland skinheads to go out and kill that black man and, even if he didn’t, where was he going to come up with the money to pay for such a verdict?

“At the counter this morning, about 70% of the people were in favor of the verdict; some thought there’d been some kind of mistake, and the rest just didn’t care,” said pharmacist Kermit Harrison, whose father opened the store back in 1945.

But on Tuesday, most people just talked about how much they didn’t know about Metzger. Or what a good deal they got last time he fixed their television.

Because, around Fallbrook, Tom Metzger isn’t known for peddling hate. He is known as just about the best and fairest TV repairman around. You could give him the keys to your house in the morning, Harrison says, and your television would be fixed by the time you got home from work.

“He never did anything racial or radical in Fallbrook,” he said. “If it wasn’t for what we saw on TV or read in the newspapers, we wouldn’t know he was any different than anyone else in this small town. He lived a quiet life with his wife and family, that’s all most people knew.”

But Fallbrook residents know something else: They’re sick and tired of having their tiny town associated with a man who all the newspapers say inspired hate and violence from coast to coast.

After all, they say, their town is a friendly place where people still say hello on the street and call you by your first name. Farmers drive tractors down Main Street. On Friday nights, people like to gather in the grandstands at Fallbrook Union High School and cheer on the local team, the football Warriors.

As one grocery clerk said: “Every small town has a secret. And our secret for years has been ol’ Tom Metzger. Ours just wasn’t as well-kept as in some towns. But we’re still ashamed of it.”

Sean Mundell, who works in Harrison’s drug store, says Fallbrook has paid for its not-so-willing association with Metzger.

“My mom’s a realtor, and she loses a good 20% of her business when people find out who lives in this town,” he said. “They find out, and they just run away. It’s frustrating for her.”

“The questions people ask you, you’d think that Fallbrook was his stronghold or something,” Harrison added. “Tom Metzger doesn’t run up and down the streets of this town like any bossman. Neither he nor his skinheads are running things here.

“In Fallbrook, Tom Metzger is a non-person. People just don’t know him for the same things they know him around the rest of the country for.”

People aren’t just tired of hearing about Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance. They’re tired of reading about it too, said Don Lowry, editor of the weekly Fallbrook Enterprise.

The paper carried not a word about Metzger’s trial in Portland. And it won’t be publishing news of the court verdict in next week’s editions--not even a wire service version of the developments.

The paper’s masthead carries a slogan billing the area as an “Avocado and Citrus Empire,” not an empire of hate.

“Frankly, most people are just embarrassed to have their hometown constantly connected with this man and his brand of hate,” Lowry said.

“Every time you hear him mentioned on the television, it’s always Tom Metzger of Fallbrook. People feel bad about that constantly being pointed out. They feel it downgrades the community. So we try not to give him any more publicity than we have to.”

There are other Metzgers in Fallbrook, people unrelated to Tom. Folks talk about the woman named Metzger who used to have a sign outside her business that said something like: “I’m not associated with Tom Metzger.”

His neighbors on Sunbeam Road had no choice but to be associated with him Tuesday. A television truck parked in front of one driveway and reporters scurried about Metzger’s ranch-style house--that one with the satellite dish and surveillance camera, which sits obscured by a fence that surrounds the front yard.

At noon Tuesday, Metzger’s wife briefly emerged to tell reporters that her husband would not arrive home until sometime tonight. But other neighbors said they saw him arrive only hours earlier--a short time after the moving van came.

No one knew if Metzger was really home. They didn’t know if he was moving quietly out of the neighborhood or if authorities had come to seize his assets. There were only rumors--more Metzger mysteries.

“He’s been living here for 30 or 40 years, and all of a sudden, because of one court verdict, people are beginning to disassociate themselves with him,” said one neighbor who asked not to be named.

“They’re just afraid of being scandalized. He’s always been a good neighbor to the people around here. Nobody agrees with his beliefs. But, whatever he did, he certainly didn’t do it in Fallbrook.”

Neighbor Carol Ashley said she saw more of Metzger on the tabloid television shows such as Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera than chatting over the neighborhood fence. Or she would watch “Race and Reason,” Metzger’s television show that runs on cable television.

“If I’d have known he lived here, I probably wouldn’t have moved on this block,” she said. “But I guess everybody’s got their judgment day coming. He just got his a little sooner.”

Minerva Covarrubias agreed that Metzger’s time had finally come.

“We’re waiting for the trucks to come and just get him out of here,” she said. “This verdict is a victory for everyone, not just the neighborhood, but the whole town, the state, the entire country.”

Covarrubias and other neighbors talked about the mysterious things they witnessed from their windows over the years.

Like the day years ago, during the time Metzger served as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, when they saw dozens of men wearing white sheets and masks line the street outside his home.

Or the walks he took around the neighborhood with his wife and prized great Dane.

“He just kind of scared you,” she said. “People would come to my house and say, ‘Does Tom Metzger really live here?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, right down there in the ugly house.’ ”

More recently, neighbor William Reuter has heard “Nazi music” coming from Metzger’s house next door, which once flew a Confederate flag overhead.

“You’d hear Nazi chants,” he said, sticking his arm straight up in a Third Reich salute. “You’d hear the Sieg Heil,” the salute to victory used by the Nazis in World War II.

For his Hispanic neighbors, one of the Metzger mysteries was the fact that a man who advocated such violence against minorities lived in a largely Latino neighborhood.

Down at the Red Eye Saloon, they had an answer for that one.

“Tom Metzger lived in that neighborhood a long time before those Mexican types ever moved in there,” said one man who claimed to have known Metzger for 35 years. “It was his neighborhood first.”

But not all of the afternoon imbibers were ready to sing Metzger’s praises.

“He sold hate and violence against people he didn’t even know,” Keith Wasnich said. “How do you hate someone you don’t even know?”

Charlie Cramm added: “That guy deserves everything he gets. But the man has his supporters. I mean, he got 4,000 votes when he ran for Congress years ago. And some of his support came from people in this town.

“But I don’t like him. He’s nothing but a rabble-rouser. Fallbrook will be very happy to get rid of one Tom Metzger. We don’t need him.”

But, if Tom Metzger has to one day move from Fallbrook to pay back his debt to the court, folks around town will miss him.

Pharmacist Harrison said: “A lot of people will wonder where they’re going to go to get their TVs fixed.”