D.A. Reviews Beating as Possible Hate Crime : Courts: Judge’s comment about ‘vicious’ attack on black teen-ager in Trabuco Canyon prompts reconsideration.

The Orange County district attorney’s office is reconsidering a possible hate crime prosecution for an attack on a black teen-ager that a judge called “one of the most vicious beatings I’ve seen in a long time.”

Although a decision was made last week not to prosecute the beating of 15-year-old Ruben Charles Vaughan III of Tustin as a hate crime, Deputy Dist. Atty. Bruce Patterson said Wednesday that the matter is being reviewed in the wake of Municipal Judge Pamela L. Iles’ statements.

“We’re certainly going to discuss it with the people in our special assignments (division) who deal with hate crime cases,” said Patterson, who heads the district attorney’s South County office.

The attack came on the night of Aug. 5 when 20 to 30 youths surrounded Vaughan in a Trabuco Canyon cul-de-sac, yelled “Get the nigger!” and beat him unconscious, breaking his nose and jaw and stabbing him seven times, an investigator has said. He was hospitalized for four days.

Iles on Tuesday ordered two men, charged with assault with a deadly weapon and causing great bodily harm, to stand trial. Derek Thomas Jones, 20, of Huntington Beach and Russell T. Scarce, 19, of Lake Forest have pleaded not guilty and are being held in Orange County Jail. Bail for each is $100,000.

Iles, long a champion of victims’ rights, said Tuesday during a preliminary hearing that the accused are lucky the charges were not stiffer.

“The district attorney could easily have filed this as attempted murder,” Iles said. “There is sufficient evidence for that in the future.”

Vaughan’s father, Melvin Aaron, praised Iles for making her bold statements.

“I guess justice is somewhere on the horizon,” said Aaron, a professor at Cal State Long Beach. Aaron has been advocating a stringent prosecution since the day after the beating.

Investigator Richard A. Jacklin of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department testified Tuesday that two groups of youths arrived at a home on Live Oak Canyon Road in Trabuco Canyon where an advertised “flyer party” was to be held that night, but there was no party.

Instead, a group of youths, most of them graduates of or students at El Toro High School, faced off with four youths from Santa Margarita High School, one of them being Vaughan. There is a history of animosity between the two groups, including another fight only a few days before the Aug. 5 incident, according to witnesses and Scarce’s parents.

After Scarce began the melee by punching Vaughan’s friend, Chris Collins, three of the Santa Margarita High youths--including Collins--ran to their car and drove off, leaving Vaughan alone to face the attackers, Jacklin testified.

Attorneys for Jones and Scarce have argued that Vaughan was caught in the middle of a turf war and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“The race thing just isn’t there,” Michael B. McClellan, a deputy public defender and Jones’ attorney, said Wednesday. “This was supposed to be a fistfight in revenge for another fistfight. This was no predetermined plan. There was no premeditated thing to isolate one particular guy because of his race.”