Two Men Charged, Warrants Issued in Attack on Migrants

Two men have been charged and arrest warrants have been issued for others suspected of beating three Latino migrants with baseball bats in Alpine earlier this month, San Diego County Sheriff Jim Roache said Thursday.

Ronald Aishman, 26, of Spring Valley pleaded not guilty to three counts of battery and three counts of assault with a deadly weapon. His bail has been set at $200,000.

Charges also have been filed against Ronald Inman, who is not yet in custody, Deputy Dist. Atty. Luis Aragon said Thursday.

The district attorney’s office has decided not to prosecute an alleged rape of a white woman that led to the Oct. 1 bat attack by six to eight Anglo men at a creek-bed encampment in Alpine.

Tensions over the presence of the day laborers in the East San Diego County town boiled over after the alleged rape, and the woman’s husband and his friends threatened the migrants for a week before the bat attack, witnesses said.

Two Mexican men and a Guatemalan national--none of them linked to the alleged rape--were beaten and seriously injured when the Anglo men invaded the encampment.

The Sheriff’s Department responded by dispatching extra teams of detectives to Alpine to investigate the attack and rape report, and interviewed dozens of people in the United States and Mexico, Roache said.

The FBI also opened a preliminary civil rights investigation, FBI spokesman Ron Orrantia said.

The assault has been designated a hate crime, which will probably increase any sentences in the case, Roache said. He would not say how many arrest warrants have been sought for other suspects.

Sheriff’s officials said they had hoped to make arrests in both cases to alleviate mounting racial pressures in Alpine. But according to the district attorney’s office, accounts given by the victim, suspect and witnesses in the alleged rape were “vague and contradictory,” Roache said.

While the woman maintained that she had been raped by one Latino man near the migrant encampment, witnesses and suspects told investigators she had been drinking beer with the men and had consensual sex with several of them, Roache said.

On Thursday evening, about 100 Alpine residents, migrant activists and law enforcement and Border Patrol personnel attended the meeting of an Alpine planning group called to focus on the migrant issue.