Skinheads to Face Trial in Drive-by Attack on Blacks

Stanton Roberts had just parked his blue Honda Civic in front of Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster after returning from a nearby basketball game when he heard gunfire. The car’s windows shattered. He was bleeding.

So was his friend Clarence Davis, 17, who was sitting in the passenger seat. Both had been grazed by bullets. In the back, Eric Dooley, 20, and his 1-year-old daughter were cut by broken glass. Roberts, 19, managed to drive to a local medical center, where all four African Americans in the car were treated for minor injuries.

Three skinheads--from a local white supremacist gang called the Peckerwoods--had allegedly fired six shots into the car on a Tuesday afternoon for no other reason than the occupants’ race, police said. The skinheads sped off in a yellow Chevrolet Malibu, triggering a citywide search, an investigation by the hate crime division of the district attorney’s office, an inquiry by the Lancaster office of the FBI and expressions of concern by the county Human Relations Commission.

Authorities are taking a closer look at a disorganized band of 80 to 100 skinheads whom the Antelope Valley branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People blame for several racial incidents in Palmdale and Lancaster since the beginning of the year.

Shortly after the Feb. 21 shooting outside the high school, police arrested Robert Garland Jr., 21, of Lancaster; Robert Andrew Jones, 20, of Gardena, and Chris Parker, 18, a Lancaster transient. Police were aided by a student who scribbled down the car’s license plate number.

Jones and Parker both have swastikas tattooed on their backs and Parker has “Dreams of White Supremacy” tattooed across his upper chest.

At a preliminary hearing Friday in Los Angeles Municipal Court, the three men were ordered to stand trial on charges of attempted murder, commission of a hate crime and child endangerment. They are being held in Los Angeles County Jail in lieu of a combined bail of more than $2 million. Each faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. An arraignment is scheduled for May 12 in Los Angeles Superior Court.

A former Antelope Valley High School student testified during the preliminary hearing that she saw a skinhead nicknamed “Evil”--a man prosecutors believe to be Parker--shoot into Roberts’ car.

Police say Parker’s gang and a Peckerwood sect called the Nazi Low Riders both believe in white supremacy and have previously demonstrated their hatred toward minorities through violent acts.

“The gangs here have increased immensely over the years,” said sheriff’s Deputy Charles Ingram, the lead investigator in the shooting. “We’ve had several incidents” with the Peckerwoods.

But the drive-by that shattered Roberts’ car windows also shattered any semblance of safety that many African Americans thought they had found when they left the violence of Los Angeles to settle in the Antelope Valley--a place that, ironically, mushroomed in the past two decades because of white flight.

Some local African Americans say the shooting was the most disturbing racial incident they have ever encountered, prompting black pastors and politicians to warn their congregations and constituents that racism is alive and growing in this remote, High Desert area.

“Without a doubt this is one of the ugliest hate-crime incidents that I’ve seen in recent years,” said the Rev. Henry Hearns, Lancaster’s only African American city councilman and pastor of First Baptist Church in Littlerock.

Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Haymond, a gang expert, said his staff identified the Peckerwoods in 1989. The group takes its name from an old epithet some blacks use to refer to whites. He attributed the rise in membership of such groups to growing resentment of affirmative action and an influx of minorities in the Antelope Valley.

Authorities said they believe the Peckerwoods were waiting to fight with another gang called the SHARPS--Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice--on the day of the drive-by shooting. When the other gang didn’t show up, prosecutors said, the Peckerwoods’ attention turned to the group in the car Roberts was driving.

According to 1990 census statistics for Lancaster and Palmdale--the largest and only two incorporated cities in the area--the African American population has doubled in both cities since 1980. Blacks made up 7.2% of Lancaster’s 97,000 residents and 6% of Palmdale’s 68,000 in 1990. Latinos made up about 20% of the population.

“A lot of the white kids are saying (affirmative action) is not fair,” Haymond said. “I think when you came up here 10 years ago there were a lot less minorities.”

Sheriff’s deputies assigned to the Antelope Valley’s five high schools said they know of the gangs, but say they have had few problems with them on campuses. Area principals also said they have heard little about skinhead activity in general.

But Lynda Thompson Taylor, president of the Antelope Valley branch of the NAACP, and others who are familiar with the Peckerwoods, say the schools are exactly where authorities should focus attention.

“We want to go into the high schools specifically, because the gangs tend to be made up of students in the high schools,” Taylor said.

Two years ago, flyers urging whites to join the White Aryan Resistance were found in 12-packs of beer at supermarkets in Palmdale. Last year, there were two hate crimes documented by the sheriff’s station. So far this year, the February drive-by is the only incident that has been classified as racially motivated.

Taylor, however, says the shooting was not the first hate crime this year. Five others have occurred since January, she said, including an incident in which young African Americans were jumped and another in which a car was damaged by men whom the owners claim were skinheads.

Consula Williams, 28, an African American resident of Palmdale, was paid a visit by the Lancaster office of the FBI after her four cousins were attacked by a Palmdale group of Peckerwoods as they walked home from Hillview Middle School in mid-February, authorities investigating the case said. Two carloads of youths chased the children, snatching a backpack from one.

“The kids have said, ‘I don’t want to go to school because skinheads are going to come after me,’ ” Williams said. As the skinheads taunted them, they flashed white power signs, crossing their two middle fingers to form a W, she said.

Hillview Principal Paul Brunner is planning to begin cultural sensitivity training for teachers at the school after meeting with Williams and Taylor, he said.

“We also discussed making sure that all ethnic groups were represented in whatever types of activities, that they feel comfortable with their surroundings and that they have role models they can emulate,” said Allan Sacks, assistant superintendent for the Westside Union School District.

For the time being, though, Williams said she will continue driving the children to and from school.