Vandals Leave Signs of Race Hatred : Crime: A black family feels the full impact of bigotry, and their home is heavily damaged.

At the crest of a softly rolling South County hill, the wide street of big homes set off by rosebushes and plum trees hardly seems the setting for a hate crime.

But six days ago, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, bigotry accompanied by a particularly vicious brand of vandalism visited a black family on Barents Street, leaving behind tens of thousands of dollars worth of destruction and spray-painted racial slurs, an act that has outraged and alarmed the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

“There is no place in the county any more that is immune to it,” said Commission Chairman Rusty Kennedy, who has scheduled a news conference for this morning with religious and community leaders and representatives of the Sheriff’s Department.

“We are coming together to join hands to say this county does not tolerate this kind of bigotry,” Kennedy said. “It’s sort of a reach-out to the family. There’s a victim here; there’s a family feeling isolated.”

Although there is no firm count of hate crimes in Orange County--money earmarked to monitor such crimes was axed from the budget last year by the governor--some officials fear that this particular kind of violence is on the rise. They cite the vandalism earlier this month committed in the home of a gay-rights activist in Anaheim, and the attack in August on high school cheerleader Amber Jefferson, whose mother is white and father is black.

On Monday evening, Delano De Silva and his wife, Laverne, led an insurance adjuster through their two-story, $370,000 home to assess the damage.

Across their newly re-upholstered ivory brocade couch, across the cathedral ceilings, across a mirror in the living room, the same racial slur is spray-painted in black.

The neighborhood, says the 42-year-old father of three teen-age sons, has been in shock since the vandals went on a rampage inside his home last Wednesday afternoon. Law enforcement officials say the break-in on Barents Street is the first such serious hate crime that they can recall in South County.

“I’ve never been violated like this,” De Silva said.

De Silva, who works as an insurance underwriter in Irvine, was born in Panama, one of eight children of a Panamanian boat builder. He joined the U.S. Air Force in his early 20s, later became a U. S. citizen and went to college on his GI benefits.

“We thought we had already dealt with things like this,” said De Silva, who speaks with a faint Spanish accent. He said he has told his children that, “this is a part of growing up, this is a part of the real world. . . . You can’t hate. There are things you are just going to have to walk away from.”

It was 14-year-old Duvahn De Silva--a Laguna Hills High School freshman who plays trumpet in the band--who discovered the break-in after walking home from school. The vandals hadn’t stopped at graffiti: every faucet in the house had been turned on and the sinks blocked, flooding the house.

Much of the wall-to-wall carpeting has been been heavily damaged and sits in warped rolls; the dining room ceiling is cracked and falls in chunks onto the floor. A chandelier sits on an antique oak table, among several family mementos that were damaged.

Among the most serious losses for Duvahn were his Nintendo video games and his Air Jordan sneakers. Both were stolen.

“We are definitely looking at this as a hate crime,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Robert Rivas, who said investigators worked through the weekend but have no suspects. Under a 3-year-old state law, so-called hate crimes, that is, crimes sparked by bigotry, are automatically prosecuted as felonies.

“It’s the first one we’ve dealt with down south that I know of. . . . It will not be tolerated,” Rivas said.

De Silva said he will send news accounts of the break-in to his oldest son, 19-year-old Jason, who is serving in the Marine Corps in Atlanta. He worries that Jason is not “conscious enough of security.”

“I want him to know things like this can happen.” De Silva said. “Then I want to get on with my life.”