Skinheads Beat Teens in Latest O.C. Hate Crime

A Chinese-American youth was knocked unconscious and treated at a local emergency room last weekend after he and two friends were attacked in a park by at least 15 skinheads shouting racial slurs and giving Nazi salutes, officials said Thursday.

Fullerton police are investigating the attack as a hate crime, the fourth in Orange County in the past two weeks. No suspects are in custody.

“It’s really troubling,” said Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission. “I’m alarmed to hear that this would happen--it was really a terrifying experience for this kid and his parents to have the specter of Nazism . . . rubbed in their faces.”

Investigators said they believe that less than three hours before the Fullerton attack, the same group of skinheads may have gotten into a shouting match with two blacks in a park in Placentia, a few miles away. But police broke up that incident.

The 17-year-old victim, who asked not be identified, graduated with honors from Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton this spring and will begin studies at UC Berkeley in the fall.

He said in an interview Thursday: “I’m still hurting pretty bad. I got some stitches in my ear area--four or five. And I have a shiner on my left eye, and lot of deep scrapes on my legs, and lot of bumps on my head--I presume from their boot-kicking while I was out.”

The victim said he was with two other teen-age friends at the time, both white. “I’m positive this was racially based, because I got the worst of it,” he said.

The victim said he and three other friends were hanging out at Gillman Park around 10:30 p.m. Sunday within a few miles of their homes when a large group of young men approached them.

One of the four teen-agers in his group was able to walk away unnoticed, the victim said. But the other three were quickly surrounded, and got a good look at the group.

“They all had . . . the typical skinhead hairdo, with boots and the black zippered-up jackets and the white tank top shirts,” he said.

For about the next five minutes, he said, the gang of 15 to 20 young men quizzed him and his two friends on their racial views.

In harsh and often-abusive language, they demanded to know what race he was and whether he was “two-toned”--or mixed--in his racial background, he said. They wanted to know if the teen-agers liked blacks. They wanted to know how the three felt about skinheads.

“It was pretty much a no-way-out situation,” he said of the questioning.

When one of his companions said he was not “for” skinheads, the victim said, the violence began.

One of the skinheads gave a Nazi salute, while someone shouted out a Nazi victory chant in German, according to the youth and Fullerton police.

Sgt. Danny Becerra, supervisor in charge of Fullerton’s crimes-against-persons detail, said the group “rushed the kids and started kicking and punching them, the whole group. . . . They were overpowered, outnumbered.”

The Chinese-American student said he doesn’t remember much of the fighting.

He said he recalls seeing one of his friends running away and getting hit with a beer bottle, while the third--the one who said he was not “for” skinheads--was jumped by about 10 of them. Then, the youth said, he himself was punched in the head and knocked to the ground.

The next thing he remembers, he said, is waking up in his friend’s car. He is still not sure how he got there.

“It wouldn’t really be that bad,” he said. “What freaks me out isn’t the fact that I got beat up, but that I got jumped by Nazi skinheads so close to where you live.”

Once he got home, the youth said, his parents took him to the emergency room at St. Jude Hospital and Rehabilitation Center, where he was given stitches, treated and released.

Becerra said of the department’s investigation: “This can be considered a hate crime, based on the preliminary information we have. . . . If you have a group of skinheads beating up on a Chinese kid, I’m sure it could be considered along those lines.”

Don Bankhead, a Fullerton city councilman and former police captain, said the incident is “one of those things that nobody wants around. You certainly don’t want it in your neighborhood.”

But, he added, he believes the attack was an “isolated” problem, saying such instances of racially motivated violence are “few and far between in this area.”

In Orange County, however, authorities have noted a recent increase in possible hate crimes.

Just in the last two weeks, the word Jew was sprayed in 3-foot-high letters on the lawn of a Jewish family’s home in Rancho Santa Margarita; a white man was arrested for allegedly attacking a black child and yelling racial slurs at him; and a black man said he was verbally assaulted and knocked to the ground by three men at John Wayne Airport.