350 Samoans Vent Anger Over Mistrial in Shootings : Law: Peaceful protest in Compton denounces a jury for deadlocking in the case of a former police officer charged with killing two brothers.

About 350 protesters circled the Compton Civic Center on Thursday to denounce a jury deadlock in the trial of a former Compton police officer charged in the shooting deaths of two Samoan brothers. The rally, steeped in Samoan custom, was peaceful and Compton police reported no incidents.

Several speakers applauded prosecutors’ plans to seek a retrial of Alfred Skiles on manslaughter charges. But many said they were nevertheless outraged by this week’s 9-to-3 jury vote in favor of acquittal.

“The mistrial is an insult, an affront to us as a people,” June Pouesi, a representative of Carson’s nonprofit Office of Samoan Affairs, told the crowd. “This mistrial gives a message to law enforcement all over the world, wherever Samoans live, that it is OK to shoot and kill Samoans when approached. What has happened here is a travesty of justice.”

Skiles--the first Los Angeles County law enforcement officer in a decade to be criminally charged in a killing--said he acted in self-defense when he shot Pouvi Tualaulelei, 34, and his 22-year-old brother, Itali Tualaulelei. Skiles at one point stopped to reload his gun, and the brothers were struck a total of 19 times.

Thursday’s rally was organized by Samoan chiefs, or matais, and other community leaders. Many noted that the brothers, members of the royal family of Western Samoa, were shot only in the back or the side, according to autopsy reports.

“For the jury to rule the way they did, they had to think Pouvi and Itali were big, unruly thugs,” said Kevin R. McLean, an attorney from the San Francisco law firm of Melvin Belli, which is representing the Tualaulelei family. “The whole focus should be on the second round of shots. . . . This makes the Rodney King case look like nothing.”

Pouvi was a former police officer in Western Samoa, according to McLean, and Itali was a football player on scholarship at El Camino College.

McLean chided the media for “burying” accounts of the mistrial because Samoans had responded peacefully to the verdict. Indeed, the relative calm in the aftermath of the decision was credited to the matai system, which emphasizes respect for elders and other authority figures.

The matais, and church and community leaders worked aggressively to diffuse tensions in the weeks following rioting in Los Angeles over not-guilty verdicts for four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating King.

They pleaded for calm, and that message reached Lago Fao, 34, who was among those in attendance Thursday.

“We wanted to lay low here,” said Fao, a resident of Carson. “The leaders from the Samoan community told us all to lay low because I’m sure that if everyone got out of control it would be a lot worse. We listen, we respect the elders and do what they ask us to do.”

Lou Sole, 42, held aloft a sign that read, “Stay Cool, Samoa.”

“We don’t want a situation like what happened after Rodney King,” said Sole, who immigrated to Carson from Samoa in 1976.

More than half of the 12,000 Samoans in the county reside in Carson, Compton and Long Beach. They have long accused police officers of harboring negative stereotypes of Samoans as violent and primitive. The deaths have sparked a new, and sometimes awkward, activism for a group that has largely refrained from public demonstrations.

“Yes, we are a big people,” said Fuiavailili Alailima, a Cal State Dominguez Hills student and president of the school’s Pacific Islander Student Union. “But we’re not bad. We are a very kind and gentle people. Even passive.”

Many in the crowd dressed in traditional Pacific Islander attire, with brightly colored skirts called lava lavas and necklaces made of seeds. They marched in front of Compton City Hall while singing Samoan songs and spiritual hymns.

“Of course, we usually wear our pants and ties here in the United States,” said John Taeleifi, 36, a Long Beach businessman. “But out of respect for our culture, today we wore the traditional garb of the island.”

Skiles has been ordered to return to court June 1 to learn whether Superior Court Judge John Reid will set a new trial date or dismiss the case. The 12-year police veteran recently retired, saying stress from the February, 1991, shootings and the trial left him unable to work.