Youth Slain in Attack Is Mourned : Services: About 120 mourners attend funeral for John Wear, 17, killed in an unprovoked Hillcrest assault with a knife.

Family, friends and classmates of John Wear, the 17-year-old high school student killed Dec. 14 in a Hillcrest attack, were urged at the youth’s funeral service Thursday to resist feelings of rage and revenge.

“The world needs more love, not hate,” said John Arrington, principal of Mark Twain Junior-Senior High School, the school Wear attended. “If we would go out and leave this building and spread love, we would be better-served.”

About 120 mourners, most of them classmates of the youth, attended the funeral at St. Therese Roman Catholic Church in Del Cerro.

Father Bill Stevenson, St. Therese associate pastor, said he understood the mourners’ “mixed feelings” of sorrow and grief combined with “anger and rage that our streets are no longer safe enough for children to walk them.

“That mixture of anger and grief leads us to ask ourselves why this had to happen, why God allowed it to happen,” Stevenson said. “There are no easy answers.”

As Arrington recited tributes from the teen-ager’s teachers, the sound of children playing at St. Therese parish elementary school filtered into the church. One of the teachers described Wear as a quiet student with a wide range of interests, an avid reader who kept to himself. “He faced any assignment with a smile,” said another.

Mourners embraced in front of the church after the service concluded, with tears and expressions of disbelief on their faces. “He’s gone to a happier place,” one teen-age girl said as she walked to her car.

John Wear was with two teen-age companions when they were attacked on the evening of Dec. 13 at the corner of Vermont and Essex streets as they walked to Soho, a popular University Avenue coffee shop. The attackers, who were described as skinheads, yelled anti-homosexual epithets. John’s two companions escaped with minor injuries but he received stab wounds to the chest.

He died a day later in Mercy Hospital after receiving 250 units of blood in a vain attempt to save his life. Burial is scheduled for today in Fresno. Police have no suspects in the case.

The slaying and 35 other assaults in the Hillcrest-Uptown area in recent months, many of which were perpetrated on gays, have spawned community outrage and a new program of citizen patrols. Police have increased the number of police patrols in the area, vowing to keep up the heat until the killer or killers is apprehended.