PORT HUENEME : Victim of Gay Bashing Sues City

A Santa Ynez man who was the victim of a gay bashing on a Port Hueneme beach last year has filed a suit seeking damages from his three attackers and the city of Port Hueneme.

In his suit, Richard Thomas Heffernan accused the three former Navy Seabees who pleaded guilty in the May 19, 1991, attack of failing to summon medical help after they kicked and beat him on a deserted beach.

Michael Breninger and Kenneth Cummings, both 20, and Sean McGeown, 18, remain in Ventura County Jail after each received a yearlong sentence in October on their guilty pleas to charges of assault.

The men--who at the time were recruits at the Naval Construction Battalion Center--were later given less than honorable discharges from the Navy.

The three men met Heffernan in a Port Hueneme adult bookstore and offered to give him a ride to the beach, prosecutors said. Once there, they turned on Heffernan and assaulted him, they said, because he is homosexual.

While Breninger held the 54-year-old victim down, the other men kicked and beat him so hard that most of the bones in his face were broken and had to be replaced by metal plates, a district attorney’s investigator said.

According to the suit filed in Ventura Superior Court on Monday, Heffernan has also charged the city of Port Hueneme with negligence for not warning the public about past criminal activity at the beach where he was assaulted.

The city routinely closed adjacent beach parking lots after dark, but continued to allow access from Surfside Drive, the suit said.

Heffernan is permanently disfigured and has been unable to work since the attack, the suit said. He also faces the prospect of additional reconstructive surgery to correct visual problems caused by the attack, said Robert J. Needham, his attorney.

Needham cited continuing medical costs, which have exceeded $50,000, as the reason for the suit. He said Heffernan has exhausted the financial benefits that he received under California’s victim’s rights bill.