Man Beaten in Laguna in Possible Hate Crime : Attack: Teen-ager is jailed after assault near gay bars that left victim so severely injured that his race is unclear.

A carload of South County high schoolers, whom city officials said were on a gay-bashing spree Saturday in an area of homosexual bars here, left an unidentified man near death from a beating so severe that hospital authorities were unable to determine his race.

An 18-year-old senior from San Clemente High School was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. Police said they may also charge him with violating the state’s hate crimes law. The suspect was identified as Jeff Michael Raines, a resident of San Juan Capistrano.

Three other juveniles with Raines at the time of the beating were not arrested, but may face lesser charges, such as violating the city curfew, police said.

“They went to a known gay area and they knew it was a known gay area,” said Police Sgt. Ray Lardie.

One of the youths, who was questioned by police Saturday night, said in an interview with The Times that he was close enough to hear the sound of the blows, but out of fear ran to a waiting car.

“I had a gut feeling that (trouble) was going down,” said the witness, who asked not to be identified. “I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to be involved in it. . . . It made me sick to think how badly” the man was beaten. “I cried all day.”

“There was no motive,” the witness added in apparent contradiction of authorities’ hate-crime theory. “Some poor guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The victim, a man between 40 and 50, was in critical condition and unconscious late Saturday at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo with severe head wounds. Police and doctors said the man’s head had been kicked and bashed against rocks until his face was virtually unrecognizable.

No one knew if the man is gay, officials said.

“Something like this just shouldn’t happen,” said Dr. Thomas Shaver, the hospital’s director of trauma services, who treated the man. “We still can’t tell who he is. He might be Asian, but we can’t tell. His face is all stomped in.”

Shocked Laguna Beach officials called an emergency meeting of the City Council on Saturday afternoon to discuss the incident and the community’s reaction. The urgent council session, at which officials called for a re-evaluation of public safety measures in the area of the attack, was the first called in about 16 years for anything other than a natural disaster.

Mayor Lida Lenney said “there is no evidence (the suspects were using) alcohol and drugs. These are people who had all of their faculties about them.”

The attack comes less than a week after five students from another Orange County high school were arrested for the murder of an honor student with whom they had allegedly been plotting a computer parts heist.

The Laguna Beach beating occurred about 1:30 a.m. Saturday at the beach end of Mountain Road, near Coast Highway. Three well-known gay bars are located near that intersection.

One man who was in the Boom Boom Room before the beating said at least one car full of young men had roared by on Pacific Coast Highway earlier Friday night and yelled “Faggots!” at people inside.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that this was a hate crime and that these kids had gone into an area known for gay bars to do some gay-bashing,” said Councilman Robert F. Gentry, who is openly gay. “This is very, very tragic, and it’s an example of the level of hate in this nation against gay and lesbian people. . . . As a gay man, I’m scared to death.”

Details of the beating remained incomplete, but Gentry said he was told that the incident started when the South County teen-agers left a non-alcohol bar on Laguna Canyon Road and drove into the gay-bar area around Mountain Road and Coast Highway.

Police said Raines and two of the teen-age juveniles with him parked their car and walked to the narrow, rocky beach at the foot of Mountain Road. They encountered a man on the beach, and an argument ensued, according to Lardie.

According to what the arrested youths told police, “the victim made some kind of derogatory remarks, and that triggered the assault,” Lardie said. “He swore at them.” Lardie added that it is not clear why the man swore at the two teen-agers.

Lardie said Raines “pushed the victim down and started kicking him in the head.” The rocky terrain on the beach worsened the injuries to the man, Lardie said.

“It’s a rock shelf” at the beach end of Mountain Road, said Lardie. “It was on real hard-textured rocks. His head was against the rocks.”

Lardie said Raines was the only one directly involved in the assault on the man. Lardie said one juvenile with Raines ran back to the car when the assault began. The other juvenile stayed with Raines but did not kick or beat the man, Lardie said.

The young witness interviewed by The Times on Saturday night said he did not believe the beating was motivated by hate. He said he rode with Raines and two others from the nightclub and ended up, only by chance, parked outside the Little Shrimp, a popular gay bar.

There, the witness said, he and the other passengers began talking with another carload of youngsters to decide where to go next. A short time later, the witness said he noticed that Raines had wandered down to the nearby beach with the driver of the car. At that point, the witness said, he walked to the top of a stairway leading to the beach when he heard dull “thuds” below.

Minutes after he returned to the car, the witness said the driver also returned and in a horrified tone said: “Let’s go! Let’s go! My stomach can’t handle this!”

According to the witness, Raines then returned a moment later and, without a word, climbed back into the car.

“We were all scared,” the witness said, nervously puffing on a cigarette as he recounted the details.

As their car pulled away, the witness said the bartender from the Little Shrimp ran toward the car cursing them. About a mile down Coast Highway, police stopped the car and, at gunpoint, ordered the occupants out and into prone positions on the street.

People who were in the area of the gay bars early Saturday morning said they saw several fleeing teen-agers about the same time that the victim’s body was discovered on the beach. The spectators, all of whom declined to be identified, said someone walked on the beach only minutes after the beating and found the man’s bloody, almost lifeless body.

They said a cry went up, and, as the yell about “someone’s been beaten on the beach!” reverberated on the narrow street, the teen-agers were seen running to a car.

Raines was booked into the Orange County Jail in Santa Ana, with bail set at $250,000.

Classmates of Raines’ at San Clemente High said he was on the school’s football team through his sophomore year and is a shot-putter on the track and field team.

At San Clemente High School on Saturday, several classmates of Raines playing a pickup game of football said they were surprised that he had been arrested.

Because of his bulky arms and legs, Raines, who is about 6-1 and weighs about 200 pounds, was widely known by the nickname “Logs,” classmates said. Despite his imposing physical presence, though, students generally described Raines as “harmless.”

“He’s not a fighter,” said one 17-year-old senior who declined to be named. “The guy was big, but not really what you would call strong at all; not aggressive either. He was pretty much the kind of guy who would do anything to fit in.”

“This would really surprise me,” said a second classmate of Raines’ alleged involvement in the beating. “I would not expect that from him. There are people in school who you would expect to do something like this, but he was not one of them.

“I think most people thought he was a harmless guy. Maybe someone who wanted to be a tough guy. I can’t believe this.”

Laguna Beach has a large gay and lesbian population. Some estimates place the number of gay residents at 20% to 30% of the city’s population. Non-residents have occasionally come to Laguna Beach to attack gays, records show.

On Jan. 15, 1991, a 37-year-old gay man was beaten and shot in the leg in Laguna Beach by three men who later escaped. Police classified that attack as a hate crime.

In December, 1988, three reputed members of a neo-Nazi skinhead group from Huntington Beach were convicted of felony assault for attacking a 48-year-old man in a local park. The sentences ranged from four to seven years in prison.

Bill LaPointe, publisher of the Orange County Blade, a monthly newspaper that circulates in the local gay community, said Saturday that the attack will likely spark even more fear among gays.

“This kind of an incident proves to me that we need to reach an educational level at much earlier stages. We are human beings. There has to be some support from government to counteract the tremendous hate that exists.”

LaPointe said he believes many attacks against gays go unreported because victims are hesitant to identify themselves.

“It becomes shocking when the (victim) can’t even get back on his own two feet,” LaPointe said. Other victims less seriously injured “would not report this out of fear that they would be publicly embarrassed or even lose their jobs. This stuff has been going on a long time.”

Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, said there has been an increase in recent months in hate-related incidents aimed at gays. He said the incidents include hate letters to a hospice for AIDS victims and an increase in hate graffiti.

The commission has attempted to record incidents of hate crimes and promotes cultural and racial unity.

Kennedy said hate attacks on gays “are senseless, vicious, twisted.” He added, however, that he believes “there’s a strong movement with overwhelming support of the county to crack down on this irrational type of hate.”

Times staff writers Timothy Chou, Kevin Johnson, Eric Young and correspondent Leslie Earnest contributed to this article.