Metzger Rejected as Mobile Home Park Tenant

White supremacist Tom Metzger, ousted from his home because of a $5-million court judgment involving a racially motivated killing, has been rejected by a small mobile home park where he sought to establish a new home.

Metzger wanted to live in the Valley Oaks Mobile Ranch, a 212-space mobile home park nestled beneath live oak and pine trees in Fallbrook.

“It’s a nice, cool, rustic place and (as a television repairman) I’ve been working for people in that park for 20 years. Now I’d like to live there,” Metzger said Tuesday by phone from a Los Angeles courthouse, where he is standing trial in connection with a cross-burning incident.

But the application of Metzger and his wife to rent a space there has been turned down by park owners.

The rejection has nothing to do with Metzger’s racial hate campaign through his White Aryan Resistance movement, the park’s attorney says. It’s just that Metzger cannot show a steady income to pay the $460 a month rent.

“They don’t have any money. Five words. They don’t have any money,” said Jim P. Mahacek, the Santa Ana attorney representing the partnership that owns the 30-year-old park.

Mahacek said Metzger’s wife, Kathleen, applied Oct. 1 to move into the park, listing her income of $2,000 a month as an employee of White Point Publishing, which printed WAR’s literature.

But Mahacek said it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that White Point had been seized in connection with the court judgment last year, when a Portland jury found in a civil trial that Metzger and WAR had incited two skinheads to murder an Ethiopian, 27-year-old Mulugeta Seraw, three years ago. Metzger personally was ordered to pay $5 million of the $12.5-million judgment against WAR, Metzger and his son, John.

Metzger’s biggest asset was his Fallbrook home of 20 years and, several weeks ago, it was awarded to Seraw’s estate, thereby reducing Metzger’s debt by $121,500.

But with the loss of that home, Metzger still received $45,000 for his homesteader allowance, which he said he was willing to apply toward “months of rent” in advance. He now rents a place in Fallbrook.

“I had the cash money to pay for the trailer (for sale within the park) and to pay for months’ rent--six months rent,” Metzger said.

But he conceded that he hadn’t offered, in the application, to advance the money.

It wouldn’t have made any difference, Mahacek said.

“Let’s assume he paid five years up front,” Mahacek said. “What if he turns around in the next four months and files for bankruptcy, which is a definite concern here. We’d have to give the money back to the trustee in the bankruptcy, yet he’d still be in our park and we couldn’t get him out.”