CALIFORNIA IN BRIEF : FALLBROOK : Tom Metzger’s Wife Dies at Age 49

Kathleen Metzger, whose white supremacist husband, Tom Metzger, was released from jail to be at her deathbed, died Wednesday at Fallbrook Hospital with him and four of her six children at her side. She was 49. Kathleen Metzger, a heavy smoker for most of her life, was found to have lung cancer in December, just a few days before Tom Metzger, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, was sentenced to jail for his part in a 1983 cross-burning incident in Los Angeles in which he was found guilty of the misdemeanor offense of unlawful assembly. Metzger’s sentence was commuted and he was released Feb. 21 after serving 46 days of his six-month sentence so that he could be with his wife. In the 28 years the Metzgers were married, Tom Metzger had risen to become a leader of the Ku Klux Klan and later had founded the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) movement.