Man Beaten as He Preached to Looters Lies in Coma

Watching images of looting on television during the second night of the Los Angeles riots, Pasadena evangelist Wallace Tope was moved to show the looters the error of their ways.

After several friends refused to accompany him, Tope, 52 and white, went alone to a shopping mall at the corner of Western Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, where hundreds of people had gathered to watch looters ravage a Sav-on drugstore. There, he began to preach, urging the agitated crowd to stop the looting and place their faith in Jesus.

The evangelist, who is not affiliated with any church, may have paid for his religious conviction with his life. As he was preaching, two men began to beat him. When he tried to flee, he fell to the ground, and the men kicked him repeatedly in the head for nearly three minutes, witnesses said.

Tope was rescued by a passing ambulance, but shortly after arriving at the hospital, he lapsed into a coma. Authorities say he is not expected to live, and they have asked for public help in identifying his assailants.

“He went up and confronted crowds of hundreds of people--spectators and looters--and started denouncing what they were doing and telling them how it was morally wrong,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Dennis Kilcoyne. “His religious beliefs were so strong; he believed that was his mission in life.”

The detective described Tope’s attackers as a Latino man about 5 feet, 6 inches tall, wearing a white, short-sleeve, button-down shirt, oversized Levi’s and a gray baseball cap, and a stocky black man, also 5 feet 6 inches, wearing brown pants and a white shirt with red sleeves. Both men appeared to be in their mid-20s.

Tope’s family and friends are devastated, but they say they are not surprised that Tope--who had dedicated his adult life to preaching--would confront an angry mob alone.

“He always wanted to be witnessing to people who were godless,” said his younger brother, Dennis, an assistant principal at Mojave High School in Kern County. “You would have a hard time stopping him from going down there. He wanted to turn these people around.”

Concerned about the potential for trouble, Tope’s mother had called her eldest son the night the rioting began and urged him to stay inside. But he made no promises.

“I think that most of the people realized it was too dangerous to go, but Wally threw caution to the wind,” Dennis Tope said.

“He shouldn’t have gone out there,” he continued, crying. “But he wouldn’t listen. Those people weren’t going to listen to him; they just wanted to pillage and loot.”

Theresa White, a neighbor, was watching the riots on television with Wallace Tope. When he announced his intention, “there was effort to stop him,” she said. “To many people, it looks like a very foolish thing that he did. But he has a heart after God, and he doesn’t always use the judgment that other people would use.”

Wallace Tope is the oldest of three children raised in a Glendale home that his brother described as not particularly religious. But while studying electronic engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Wallace Tope became a “born-again” Christian.

After graduating in 1964, he worked for a Pasadena microwave research center, then a Hawthorne engineering firm, his brother said. But those jobs “didn’t satisfy his desire to work for Christ,” Dennis Tope said. So in 1967, Wallace Tope quit his job and started attending courses at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Since then, he has preached and written Christian literature, including articles questioning the theological underpinnings of some Christian groups.

He traveled around Europe and Asia speaking about his faith, and he was once jailed for trespassing when he went to Mormon-affiliated Brigham Young University and told students that Mormons were “preaching a false doctrine,” his brother recalled.

Wallace Tope has lived mainly on donations and the income from his writings. Friends said he leads a “Spartan” existence in a studio apartment, driving an old secondhand car. He is not married.

Dennis Tope said that he had spoken to his brother repeatedly about avoiding confrontations. But the preacher’s response was always the same: “God will protect me.” Police said that as he lay in the ambulance gravely wounded, he mumbled, “Believe in Jesus, believe in Jesus.”