Police Now Say Attacks Not ‘Wilding’ : Crime: The North Park-Hillcrest task force arrests two, and police deny that the assaults were limited to blacks against whites. A gag is put on the detective who first spoke up.

As San Diego police moved Wednesday to diffuse controversy over a purported series of “wildings” in North Park and Hillcrest, they arrested two teen-agers in an apparent “gay-bashing” incident in which the victim said he was threatened with a gun, punched and robbed of his wallet and watch.

Members of a task force assigned to patrol the area since Monday arrested Randall Lee Rollings, 18, and Richard Laurence Gorondy, 19, both of San Diego. The victim, Michael Anthony Martinez, 24, told police he began yelling after two men pointed a gun at him in the 4000 block of 30th Street at about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Two task force members arrived, and one chased down Gorondy. Gorondy allegedly implicated Rollings, who was arrested at his home on Swift Avenue, police said.

Although the men yelled anti-gay slurs, homicide detectives do not believe the attack is linked to last week’s stabbing death of 17-year-old John Robert Wear because the descriptions of the assailants do not match, homicide Lt. Paul Ybarrondo said.

It was Wear’s death that sparked a public outcry against a series of beatings, mostly along University Avenue, that began in July and has since led to the creation of volunteer community patrols in the area.

But, in the last few days, police have inexplicably backtracked from a number of assertions made about the series of attacks.

Initially, they said at least 50 attacks had occurred since last June, and the lead detective on the cases proclaimed the crimes “wilding,” because violence seemed to be the motive and robbery an afterthought. In every one of the cases, Detective Steve Baker said, blacks had attacked whites. Baker said Wednesday he had been ordered not to discuss the case with the press.

In announcing the creation of the task force Monday, Police Chief Bob Burgreen lowered the number to 35, saying that earlier estimates had erroneously included other crimes that were not part of the series.

On Tuesday, Capt. Winston Yetta, the head of the Western Division that patrols University Avenue in North Park and Hillcrest, told The Times that, although blacks had attacked whites, other types of attacks had surfaced, including white-on-white crime. The two suspects arrested Wednesday are white.

He said every case from the last several months was being re-examined to determine the nature of each attack.

Yetta abandoned the idea of a “wilding” spree in an interview with The Times Wednesday.

“We don’t have wilding here,” he said. “We have street robberies. I have read all the (crime) reports, and the main motive is robbery, even though only cigarettes were taken in one case and a baseball cap in another.”

Even Lt. Tom Giaquinto, named the head of the task force on Monday, said he was bewildered at first.

“I’m in here hearing about wilding and skinheads, and I’m saying, ‘Wait a minute? Where did this come from?’ I started taking a hard, analytical approach and found that the picture started changing,” he said. “We need some hard-core answers to know what the hell’s going on.”

Once the word “wilding” was used and the implications of race surfaced, Giaquinto said, the community flew into an rage that escalated following Wear’s death.

City Councilman John Hartley listened to dozens of residents in his district demand volunteer patrols and got Burgreen to agree to have police conduct training sessions. Pacific Bell donated cellular telephones for volunteers to use during patrol.

Although many in the gay community fixated on the violence confronting homosexuals, police insisted that the violence was spread among a number of groups. Today they still cannot definitely categorize it.

“Everything was placed into one big stew,” Giaquinto said. “If it should be, that’s fine. But statistically, we have to know exactly what we’re dealing with so we can figure out what tactics we have to use.”

Media attention about the series, or several series, has prompted a rash of people to report attacks in Hillcrest and North Park who had not previously come forward. Some were fearful of being identified as gay or linked with homosexual activity, detectives said.

In Wednesday morning’s arrest, detectives had few details about the suspects and could not yet tell whether they were linked to any other attacks.

Ybarrondo, of the homicide team, said it did not appear they were involved in Wear’s stabbing.

Although the attackers in the Wear case were originally described as skinheads, they now are said to sport close-cropped hair, combat boots and flannel shirts. In contrast, one of the alleged assailants in the Martinez case has long blond hair, and the other is 6-foot and 220 pounds. The person said to have stabbed Wear has been described as 5-foot-9 and 165 pounds.