Individuals, Not Groups, Responsible for Increase in Hate Crimes

In El Monte, a Chinese-Vietnamese man wakes up to find a plywood sign, five feet long, that says “Kill All Chinezs Gooks” looming into his back yard from his neighbor’s fence. The sign has a gun strapped to it.

After a bullet shatters the Asian man’s windshield two months later, police search the neighboring house and find the sign, along with Nazi flags, a small arsenal of guns and a clubhouse shack crammed full of hate material and posted as “Nazi Nigger Hunter Headquarters.”

In Glendora, a man walks into a Denny’s restaurant, fires a Nazi salute at a table of African-American men, and beats them with a baseball bat, splitting one of their heads open before yelling, “White supremacy!”

As details unfold about white supremacists recently arrested in Southern California for an alleged plot to kill prominent African-Americans, police reports from throughout San Gabriel Valley’s demographically changing communities reveal the region’s own catalogue of hate crimes.

White supremacist groups have taken firmer root in the area in recent years, with even the nationally prominent White Aryan Resistance offering a post office address in Covina.

But crimes against members of virtually all ethnic groups have not been limited to the activities of the white organizations; hate appears to be the growing province of many individuals from many backgrounds. Although some of the most egregious cases have been prosecuted, most go unsolved.

“We’ve said for a number of years that hate crimes are spread pretty evenly throughout the county. In schools, too, they seem totally unrelated to geographic area or economic circumstance,” said Eugene Mornell, executive director of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. “The conclusion is: Bigotry is bigotry, regardless of economic status or class.”

He added: “There’s relatively little (organized) hate group activity in Los Angeles County. In schools, we looked at over 2,200 incidents in 1989; less than 5% were attributable to white supremacist groups of any kind.”

A 1993 Anti-Defamation League report on white supremacist skinheads put their number nationwide at fewer than 3,500. Mornell said he believes their number in the area is decreasing.

Yet the two high-profile San Gabriel Valley hate cases this year have been tied to suspects who, though not members of an organized group, parade their white supremacist beliefs.

After El Monte resident Sang Lam traced the bullet that shattered his windshield in February to a hole in his neighbor’s fence, he called police and showed them photographs he had taken of the anti-Asian sign displayed there two months earlier.

His neighbor, William Joseph Taylor, 31, was arrested and faces trial on charges of making terrorist threats and violating Lam’s civil rights. The pretrial hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

According to court documents, officers who searched Taylor’s Fandon Avenue house looking for a gun to match the bullet casing in Lam’s car found a 9-mm Uzi semiautomatic assault pistol, a 9-mm Glock handgun and a .22-caliber rifle, all legally registered to Taylor, El Monte Police Detective John Fentress said.

Taylor’s bedroom yielded three Nazi flags and a white plastic safari hat that says “10 Niggers War Chief Headhunter,” according to the documents.

Fentress said Taylor has been at the helm of a loose-knit group that dubbed his Fandon Avenue house “El Monte Skinhead Headquarters.”

“We were told by people that there was a lot of kids hanging out there claiming to be skinheads, and we had received some information that Taylor was making pipe bombs there,” said Fentress, who added that the search yielded no bomb paraphernalia.

“He was definitely the leader of the pack. All these kids kind of look up to this guy as their superstar,” Fentress said.

“It’s mostly a bunch of little pencil-necked kids. I don’t even know who most of them are,” Fentress said. But a few months before Taylor’s arrest in February, Fentress had arrested 19-year-old Arthur Weitzel at the Fandon Avenue hangout on suspicion of arson and several car-bombings.

Weitzel pleaded guilty to setting on fire a truck that belonged to a Latino man and was sentenced to three years in prison, but claimed the incident was not racially motivated, Fentress said.

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Taylor’s attorney, William Graysen, said he thinks his client is a lonely, insecure man who succumbed to the pressure of other skinheads, and allowed them to use his house as their haunt. Taylor denies putting up the five-foot racist sign and says he doesn’t know how it got in his back yard and remained there for 20 days, the attorney said.

“All he says about the skinhead stuff is that he used to be into it, but he’s not any more,” said Graysen, who added that he would like to “reform” his client. “I feel that he was a hanger-on, not a real devotee, just a lonely man. He just doesn’t have the skinhead fire. He’s not that passionate about racism.”

Graysen has ordered a psychiatric examination of Taylor, and said he hopes the results may eventually lead to a plea bargain. But for now, his client is not talking.

In the Glendora Denny’s beating case, Sean Evan Cavener, 21, pleaded no contest to assault and hate crime charges. He was sentenced to three years in state prison, according to court records.

Glendora police said Cavener denied any connection with white supremacist groups or beliefs. But victims and witnesses testified at Cavener’s preliminary hearing that he directed a Nazi salute at the group of six black men dining quietly at a corner table; when one of the men got up to confront him about the salute, he attacked two of them with a bat, and yelled “white supremacy!” before fleeing.

Cases like these hint at a climate of hate, but statistics documenting hate-motivated crimes are difficult to come by.

“We’re beginning to make an effort now to keep track of them, but it’s still in its infancy,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Ellen Aragon, whose office handles the majority of county cases involving hate crime prosecutions.

“The cases that we get are just the very tip of the pyramid,” Aragon said. “At the broad end of the pyramid, there may be thousands of racial incidents. Some of those may be crimes. Of those reported to police, some, police don’t bother to report them as hate crimes. Then you boil those down to ones where police actually feel they have a suspect. In most cases, nobody ever gets caught.”

Though the county Human Relations Commission issues an annual report of hate crimes listed by city, the group relies on police agencies to collect the data.

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According to the commission’s report on 1992 incidents, Azusa and Pasadena led the San Gabriel Valley with 12 and 10 hate crimes, respectively. The numbers then fall off sharply, with four in Altadena and only one in the other cities reporting.

The different systems of classifying crimes at various police departments tend to skew results, with the most vigilant cities appearing as hotbeds of intolerance. But the numbers did show a marked increase over 1991. In that year, Azusa had two racially motivated crimes, and Pasadena had one.

Several of Azusa’s 1992 incidents reflect crimes committed against two African-American women and their families. The women fled the city after what they described as a nine-month harassment campaign by Latino youths to drive them away. Last September, shots were fired into one of their homes, and both families moved shortly thereafter.

On July 22, the women filed suit in Pomona Superior Court against the Azusa Police Department, alleging that officers did little to prevent the reign of terror.

Azusa police Capt. Bob Garcia said the department would not comment on pending litigation. But, he said, the department has done its best to investigate alleged hate crimes, and has taken part in a school program to encourage cooperation among ethnic groups.

“By and large, we have black families who are very satisfied living here,” Garcia said.

Most of Azusa’s classified hate crimes involve conflicts between black and Latino youths, Garcia said, noting that of five hate crimes logged since January, all had gang implications.

In one June incident, black youths who were playing basketball in a public park were harassed and attacked by a group of Latino youths. In another incident at an Azusa mini-mart, a group of black youths harassed and threatened a group of Latino youths who were buying sodas, Garcia said.

“This is nothing new. It goes back to the zoot suit days,” Garcia said, referring to tensions between Latinos and Anglos in the 1940s.

Officials in other cities concede that the demographic changes that have swept the San Gabriel Valley over recent years brought with them heightened tensions.

“We have seen more white supremacist skinheads in the whole foothill area, say, over the past five years,” said Glendora police spokesman Brian Summers. “I know we have had some identifiable white supremacists in town.”

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One of them is Timothy Zaal, a Glendora resident for several years who was among those convicted in the 1989 beating of an Iranian couple in La Verne by four men who identified themselves as neo-Nazis. The men mistook the couple for Jews.

A San Gabriel Valley phone number for the national White Aryan Resistance, founded by former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon Tom Metzger, offers a Covina post office box for correspondence. The box has been operating in Zaal’s name since 1990, post office officials confirmed.

But police say the majority of white supremacists in Glendora are neither high-profile nor dangerous.

“We’ve got kids running around claiming white pride or white power, but there isn’t anything really major going on here,” said Glendora police Detective Gregory Santelices.

Some minority residents in Glendora have been made to feel less than welcome, however.

In January, a family of Asian-Indian descent found the outside of their home defaced with ketchup and mustard. On the wall was a message: “Happy New Year. Supreme White Power,” Santelices said.

And in late April, a Latino family on the other side of town received this note: “This is SWP, Supreme White Power, and we don’t like you, so get the f--- out of here. From SWP.”

There are no suspects in either incident, Santelices said.

About two months ago, a white supremacist handbill showed up on front lawns in Glendora. When a city employee who deemed the content “ugly” wrote to the Tennessee publishers to inform them they they needed a handbill permit, the publishers shot back a letter stating that they were “a recognized political organization and First Amendment protected,” the employee said.

In West Covina, six incidents have been logged since January as hate-related, according to the Police Department’s crime analyst. Those included racial epithets painted on a car and a letter sent to a black man calling him “a dog.” The air was also let out of his tires.

None of the incidents have led to arrests, the analyst said.

In Diamond Bar, vandals believed to be teen-age taggers in February broke into an elementary school classroom geared to Mandarin-speaking children. In addition to scrawling “Taggers Rule” on the walls, they included some anti-Asian remarks, Sheriff’s Lt. Bob Knapp said.

Most law enforcement officials, however, describe the San Gabriel Valley’s topography of hate as constant, with neither an alarming rise in incidents nor a noteworthy reprieve.

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The FBI is investigating the harassment of the Azusa families who recently filed suit against the Police Department, and has undertaken one other civil rights investigation in the San Gabriel Valley, FBI supervisory Special Agent Steve Steinhauser said.

“We’re finding small, loosely knit groups of individuals who share some affinity in their ideology regarding races. They may or may not get to the point where they commit an overt act,” Steinhauser said. The area is not viewed as a hotbed for hate-crimes or white supremacists, he said.

The phone message of the San Gabriel Valley-based hot line for White Aryan Resistance offers a different analysis:

“The government seems to think that this show-biz bust will scare the skinheads into a brain-dead trance and paranoia. On the contrary. They’re pissed off,” the message says of the recent FBI investigation and arrests.

“Only eight persons were allegedly busted. There’s much, much more in Southern California. The possibilities are endless . . . if (the skinheads) are more security-conscious.”