Boy Is Victim in 1 of 2 O.C. Hate Crimes

Orange County authorities are investigating two apparently unrelated hate crimes against blacks over the weekend, one of them involving a 12-year-old boy in Mission Viejo who police say was run off the road and attacked for walking with white children.

The first attack occurred late Friday night at John Wayne Airport. A 34-year-old San Francisco man, in town for a wedding, was waiting in the passenger-loading zone, he said, when a burly man repeatedly yelled racial slurs and then hit him from behind with a heavy box, knocking him to the ground.

“I think it was just somebody that had nothing better to do,” said the victim, Wendell Clayton Carmichael, a former probation officer in Orange County.

“It could have been racist, I don’t know. I lived in Orange County. I know there are (racial) problems there,” he said, recalling past warnings from friends to avoid certain parts of South County. “So I’m not surprised by this.”

The scene of racism played itself out again Sunday, sheriff’s deputies said, when a 12-year-old boy in Mission Viejo was walking back from a store with an older black boy and two white girls.

The children were on Via Pimiento, near Los Alisos Boulevard, shortly after 4 p.m., deputies said.

According to deputies, a white man in a blue sports car swerved toward the children as they were crossing the street, forcing them to the curb.

The driver then got out and started to yell racial slurs, chasing the children and berating “the white kids for being with a black,” said Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the county’s Human Relations Commission.

The driver, described as in his 30s, then knocked the 12-year-old boy to the ground with a blow to the ribs and struck him in the face before driving off, authorities said. The boy was not seriously hurt.

“A 12-year-old kid being beaten by a 30-year-old racist is disgusting and it’s intolerable and it’s outrageous,” Kennedy said after speaking with the boy’s mother Monday. “There’s no place for that type of person on the streets.”

Added Mission Viejo Mayor Robert A. Curtis: “I’m shocked to hear about it. It’s an outrageous affront to the entire community.” He said that such “isolated instances” unfairly place the city under “a cloud.”

Sheriff’s Department Lt. Richard J. Olson said investigators are treating both incidents as assault and battery, and as hate crimes. The two cases are not believed to be connected because the descriptions of the attackers and their vehicles were different, he said.

Under a 1987 state law, civil rights statutes were broadened to ban violence or threats based on race, ancestry, religion, national origin, disability, sex or sexual orientation. Such offenses, often treated as misdemeanors before, can now be prosecuted as felonies.

“The last (hate-crime investigation) we’ve had was several months ago,” Olson said. “It’s rare that we’ve had these types of situations at all, and to have two in (one weekend) is very rare.”

Two widely publicized hate-crime investigations recently involved vandalism at the home of a black family in Laguna Hills, spray-painted last year with racial epithets, and the near-fatal head injuries of Garden Grove teen-ager Amber Jefferson after a street fight in August, 1990.

Prosecutors ultimately concluded that the attack on Jefferson, whose father is black and whose mother is white, was not racially motivated. But the Sheriff’s Department nonetheless came under a storm of criticism from civil rights groups over the way it handled the case. As a result, the department set up a new system for treating hate-crime investigations.

That new system was evident Monday as the Sheriff’s Department notified both the county’s Human Relations Commission and local media as to the racial nature of the two weekend cases.

“I think the Sheriff’s Department is becoming increasingly sophisticated at handling this issue,” said the Human Relations Commission’s Kennedy. He added that he believes “some of the lessons” the department learned from the Amber Jefferson case have allowed it to “take a leadership role” among county law enforcement in tackling racial issues.

However, Carmichael, victim of Friday’s attack at the airport, said he was chagrined by the handling of his case by airport security and sheriff’s deputies at John Wayne.

A program director for an AIDS group in San Francisco, Carmichael said in an interview that he was waiting for a ride from the airport about 11 that night when he heard three men in a burgundy car shout racial epithets, but he ignored them.

Carmichael said he had never seen the men before and had no idea what set them off.

Then, he said, a muscular man, about 6 feet tall and at least 240 pounds, got out of the car and continued yelling slurs, seeming to challenge him to a fight. From behind, the man then hit him on the back with a large, heavy box, sending him hurtling against the hood of the car and to the curb, he said.

“Watch me deck a nigger!” Carmichael quoted the man as saying.

Carmichael said he called out for security officers but found none in the largely deserted airport as the men drove off.

Even after he was referred to sheriff’s deputies at the airport a few minutes later, Carmichael complained, “I was given the third degree--they asked more things about me than (the suspect).”

Carmichael said he suffered a bruised shoulder in the attack.

The 12-year-old boy in Mission Viejo had a cut lip, Kennedy said, but apparently did not require stitches. Speaking through Kennedy, the family declined to comment on the incident.