9 More Students Suspended Over Fight Now Probed as Hate Crime

School officials suspended nine more students from Aliso Niguel High School on Friday in connection with a racially charged incident that led to a brawl in the school lunchroom, authorities said.

Meanwhile, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department interviewed more than 25 students on campus Friday, investigating the incident as a possible hate crime involving gangs, according to Lt. Tom McCarthy.

An African American student was struck with a soda can and cut under his right eye during the fracas, which broke out around noon Wednesday, McCarthy said.

“We’re investigating it as a hate crime--assault and battery,” he said. “We believe the incident was racially motivated. The victim is African American, and the suspect is white.”

Nineteen of the 20 students who took part in the melee have been suspended, and several may be expelled, Jacqueline Price, spokeswoman for Capistrano Unified School District, said Friday.

McCarthy said investigators hoped to discover to what degree two gangs--the Brothers United Cartel, a black gang, and the Vandals, a white supremacist gang--were involved. Both have been active in South County.

“It’s safe to say that some of the [20] students who took part in the incident were gang members,” McCarthy said, “but clearly, some were not.”

The incident had its beginnings in the parking lot of a Laguna Niguel shopping center May 12, when members of the black gang began taunting their white rivals with “hand signals” known as an “invitation to rumble,” McCarthy said.

They made a pledge to fight one another in the same parking lot Wednesday night, but hostilities broke out on campus when some of the white students began throwing food at the black students during lunch, investigators said.

Along with McCarthy, a sheriff’s sergeant and nine deputies went to the school on Friday, where students also received a visit from Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

Kennedy’s visit was prompted by a need “to discuss appropriate actions and measures to prevent incidents such as this and to explore measures to reduce tension on the campus,” according to a press release distributed by the Sheriff’s Department.

Parents applauded the move toward racial awareness, with several saying the school--a sprawling, $45-million facility that opened just two years ago--is feeling the crunch of the rapid growth and changing demographics of south Orange County.

“It’s like the school and the district don’t have any policies for dealing with such a disturbance--for what lies behind it,” said Sherry Keating, 38, whose son witnessed the fight. “They need more racial awareness programs and more head-on ways of dealing with this stuff. Because, believe me, it won’t go away.”

Keating said she had seen a videotape of the incident, recorded by one of the students in the lunchroom.

“All of the kids were going at it just about equally, I’d say. Some people are making it sound like it was five black kids and 30 white kids, but it wasn’t that way at all,” said Keating, who is white.

However, Lisa Smith, 33, an African American parent with a daughter in the school, said she had heard that white “skinhead” students provoked the disturbance by making an insulting comment to some black students.

When an African American student then asked them to repeat the statement, they used a derogatory term to refer to blacks, Smith said. “Then, once they threw food, everyone started fighting. I’m really troubled by this. They need some serious racial awareness not just at that school but throughout Orange County. Hey, open your eyes, people.”

Price, the school district official, declined comment on the parents’ statements, saying the incident “remains under review.”