Mother Says Son No Skinhead or Racist : Suspect: White teen investigated for hate slaying ‘has had friends of every race’ and harbored no animosity, she says.

Jonathan Russell Kennedy--the white teen-ager whose alleged slaying of an African American man last week is being investigated as a possible hate crime--was not part of any skinhead group and held no racist views, his mother said in an interview Tuesday.

“Every time something starts happening between people of different colors, somebody starts yelling ‘race,’ ” said Rhody Kennedy, a 37-year-old office manager for an insurance company. “I’m positive it was not” a racial incident, she said.

“I wasn’t there. I wish I could have been there or have had him home,” she added. “My heart hurts terribly for everyone and everything involved.” Rhody Kennedy said her son shaved his head only Sept. 13, after she complained that the blond coloring in his close-cropped hair looked bad. Neighbors said they did not know the Kennedys, who moved in two weeks ago, but described Jonathan Kennedy as having blond hair.

“Everybody in Huntington Beach . . . they all shave their heads,” Rhody Kennedy said.

She said her son, a 19-year-old high school dropout, harbored no racial bias.

“He’s had black friends and Mexican friends and Filipino girlfriends,” she said. “He’s had friends of every race.”

Jonathan Kennedy and a 17-year-old youth are charged with murder in the shooting death last week of Vernon Windell Flournoy, 44, outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Huntington Beach. Prosecutors said Tuesday they would attempt to try the juvenile as an adult.

Jonathan Kennedy has also been charged with attempted murder in the shootings of two Latinos, Juan Vergara and Angel Campos Silia, both 22, on Aug. 3.

Rhody Kennedy said her son, whom she calls Rusty, was a talented student who skipped a year in junior high school. His legal last name is Kinsey--the name under which he was last enrolled in Valley Vista High School in Fountain Valley--but he has gone by his stepfather’s name since his mother married and adopted the name Kennedy eight years ago, she said.

After mother and son moved to Huntington Beach from Alaska five years ago, Jonathan Kennedy dropped out of high school and was convicted as a juvenile for taking part in a burglary, Rhody Kennedy said.

Jonathan Kennedy, who has a 2-month-old son living with a girlfriend elsewhere in Huntington Beach, was on his own for more than a year before he moved back in with his mother two weeks ago, Rhody Kennedy said. She said she does not know where in Huntington Beach he lived during that time but said he kept in close touch by phone.

“He always calls and says ‘I love you, Mom,’ ” she said, picking a 2-year-old photograph of her son from a cluster of family pictures on the coffee table. “I know I should know more, but he was always doing his own thing,” she said.

Rhody Kennedy said she visited her son in jail last weekend but did not ask him whether he was responsible for Flournoy’s slaying or the August shootings.

She said that Kennedy’s lips were swollen and that he told her Flournoy had punched him during the confrontation. Rhody Kennedy said she did not know whether her son owned a gun and doubted he would have started such a fight.

“I’ve never known Rusty to just go say something to somebody--especially to an older person,” she said.