Hate Is Boiling in O.C.’s Social Caldron

It started with the intimidation and name-calling that punctuates life in this otherwise laid-back surf town: a couple of in-your-face skinheads cruising their stomping ground with a beer buzz, confronting minorities about “white power.”

But on this February night, the harassment veered sharply to violence when one youth pulled out a hunting knife and stabbed an American Indian man 27 times, a beach attack so frenzied that the assailant’s accomplice was also wounded.

George Mondragon, 20, miraculously survived the assault, which came just one week after what authorities said was an unprovoked slaying of a Vietnamese American man in Tustin, an attack also being investigated as a hate crime.

Orange County civic leaders have responded with a chorus of revulsion, calling the incidents freakish displays of rage in a county whose changing racial landscape has created ongoing tensions.

Hate crime statistics appear to support the contention that such attacks are rare: There were just 175 reported hate crimes in 1995--about the same number as in each of the previous three years. Homicides and physical assaults were even rarer, comprising just a small part of the total.

But some minorities who live in predominantly white enclaves of the county say the harassment that led to Mondragon’s stabbing is all too common. They lead lives, they say, peppered with epithets and petty humiliations that are largely dismissed or unnoticed by law enforcement agencies or political leaders.

“There are some people who don’t experience this kind of harassment,” said Pat Callahan, executive director of Orange County Together, a group formed in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots to encourage interethnic dialogue.

“They think these are isolated incidents. They don’t realize that it’s happening to people who are going to the store. They don’t realize that it’s happening in the grocery line. It’s these sort of daily, subtle insults that add up over time. The big high-profile incidents are symptoms of a caldron underneath--our social caldron.”

On Thursday, Orange County Together will launch its first “day of dialogue” in an Orange County city, turning Garden Grove into the site for dozens of discussions on racial diversity, with the endorsement of the City Council and myriad civic groups. Talks will take place in churches, temples, businesses, private residences, community organizations, hospitals and other centers across the city.

Daily Dose of Hate

For James Lawrence, 41, chief electrical inspector for the city of Huntington Beach, such efforts must address common harassment. Lawrence said he has been called “nigger” by a band of drunken skinheads who told him to “go back to Africa.” A ranting neo-Nazi teenager has flipped him off as he drove down Main Street in a city vehicle, he said.

His daughter, 16-year-old Giana Lawrence, sits at a Huntington Beach High School desk with a swastika engraved in it, and opens her used English textbook to read a former student’s scrawl: “There should be no black people on the planet.”

The attacks on Mondragon and a black man who was gunned down in Huntington Beach two years ago have brought back haunting memories of James Lawrence’s childhood in Biloxi, Miss., where he witnessed a lynched classmate hanging in a tree and a drowned girl found floating face-down in the pool at his elementary school. Both African Americans were murdered during the racial upheaval of the Deep South in the early 1960s.

“I come all the way out here, and there are all these . . . skinheads,” said Lawrence, who has little hope the city’s mood will change.

Though experts on racial conflict stress that harassment escalates into violence only rarely, they say the name-calling and aggressive confrontation lay the groundwork for such outbursts.

According to the Orange County Human Relations Commission, skinheads and other white supremacists were responsible for the majority of reported hate incidents in 1995--committing 102 of 175 crimes and targeting African Americans and Jews in the largest numbers.

Most of the crimes appear to be committed by juveniles or young adults, according to Rusty Kennedy, the commission’s executive director.

Huntington Beach Mayor Dave Sullivan said city officials are taking the attacks seriously, and plan to unveil a policy next week that condemns all acts of hate in an effort to send a message that racists are unwelcome. But he stressed that the city is safe.

“Using the FBI stats for the past two years, we’ve been selected as [among the safest cities] in America in the category of cities over 100,000,” he said. “It certainly hasn’t prevented people from coming downtown.”

Todd B. Nicholson, president of the Orange County Business Council, said he does not consider Orange County’s racial tensions “serious.” In fact, he said, the county should be proud of its safety record; Irvine is also ranked among the safest cities of its size in the United States.

“I think we’re very progressive,” he said. “There probably aren’t communities anywhere in the country that don’t have isolated incidents, whether they’re termed hate crimes or other types of crime. We’re all faced with dealing with that in society.”

But others agree that a small number of youths seem to be practicing hate with an unparalleled brazenness. While the county has seen its share in recent years of hate literature distributed clandestinely on campuses or stuffed into product boxes at grocery stores, hate crimes have increasingly moved into the arena of direct confrontation.

Joyce Greenspan, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League of Orange County and Long Beach, said her small office averages four or five calls daily from people reporting racial or religious slights, name-calling and other forms of harassment.

“The point is that it is extremism, and when one is dealing with any kind of extremism, it can get out of hand. It can go from the fliers in the locker to shooting out windows of foreign cars to stabbing someone to death on a beach.

“What we’re seeing is that the trend is much more harassment than vandalism,” she said. “There is much more verbal abuse.”

To a Violent End

The suspected assailants of George Mondragon began their evening with just such abuse, police say. Mondragon tried to flee when they confronted him, but one youth knocked him to the ground and the other attacker pulled out the knife.

Mondragon survived with stab wounds to the chest, liver, back, neck, colon and hands. Thien Minh Ly, 24, was not as fortunate. A week earlier, the former UCLA student leader was found stabbed to death on the Tustin High School tennis courts where he had been practicing in-line skating.

Investigators later arrested 21-year-old Gunner J. Lindberg and Domenic Christopher, who has turned 18 since the slaying. According to police search warrants, Lindberg allegedly wrote a letter to a former prison buddy after the killing, boasting that he “killed a Jap the other day” and recounting the crime in callous detail. Prosecutors say they may file a hate crime enhancement in connection with the murder.

Last month, a 19-year-old Laguna Niguel man who carried Hitler quotations and a white-supremacist cartoon in his wallet was convicted of murder and a hate crime as the accomplice in the 1994 fatal shooting of Vernon Fluornoy outside a Huntington Beach McDonald’s Restaurant. The 20-year-old shooter had already pleaded guilty to murder and hate crime charges for the slaying of Fluornoy, an African American.

Fluornoy, 44, and his wife, had moved to the coastal city from Hollywood after the 1992 riots to get away from urban troubles.

Last week, an Orange County jury found Chad Salisbury, 27, of Los Alamitos guilty of a hate crime and assault with a deadly weapon in connection with an attack on a young Anaheim man of Asian Indian descent.

Mark Sanjay David, 25, was beaten unconscious last summer outside an Orange punk rock club by skinheads who first shut the venue down by roughing up a black guitarist on stage, according to police and the victim’s father, Albert David.

“They noticed my son and said, ‘Oh look what we have here,’ ” said Albert David, 55, a handyman who has lived in Orange County since 1981. “One of them said, ‘Tell us which is the super-Aryan race. The answer you give could save your life.’ ”

Then they dragged Mark David off and beat him with metal pipes--injuring him so severely he spent several days in intensive care and still undergoes physical therapy, his father said.

Underlying such violence, authorities say, is a far more common landscape of insults and threats.

“I can always feel the tension, like I don’t belong here,” said 18-year-old Khalilah Slaughter of Huntington Beach, who stepped out on a recent night with her Puerto Rican boyfriend and was confronted by a white man with a knife who called her companion “a nigger.”

A deep sense of not belonging has forced Slaughter into an independent study schooling program to avoid attending regular high school. Her mother, 41-year-old Sandra Martin, said the incidents of harassment have only heightened the family’s isolation in a city where they can’t get the black cable channel and must go to Long Beach to buy black beauty products.

Martin said she no longer takes her 2-year-old grandson to the beach to collect seashells, “just in case” something were to happen. And she now feels a tugging worry whenever Slaughter leaves the apartment.

“Even if she goes to get the mail, I’ll be wondering if she ran into someone,” Martin said.

Underlying Tensions

Such harassment is not limited to Huntington Beach. A mixed-race couple who bought a townhouse in Anaheim Hills earlier this month received an anonymous letter last week penned “Dear Mismatch.”

The letter berated the couple for “how much our neighborhood has depreciated sense (sic) the white boy and the niger (sic) moved in. . . We have heard people like you are like roaches, you travel in packs and infest every neighborhood you move to,” reads the letter, which told the couple to “go back to Watts.”

The recipient, 27-year-old Monique Frith, said the hate mail has deepened her resolve to stay in the neighborhood. But it has also made her regretfully suspicious of her neighbors. Police are investigating the letter, which also complained about the couple’s barking dog.

“I don’t want to pinpoint one person, but I look at people and it’s making me wonder, ‘Could it really be them?’ ” Frith said.

In some South County schools, racial confrontations have created an atmosphere of intolerance, minority parents say. Tensions peaked last year when 20 white and African American students faced off in a lunchroom brawl at Aliso Niguel High School that left several students injured. Minority parents have roundly criticized school officials for not addressing the apparent underlying racial tensions.

One African American parent, who asked that her name not be used in order to protect her children, said she transferred her daughter from Aliso Niguel to another school after the youngster complained that a teacher had made derogative comments about black people.

The woman said her seventh-grade son has been chased home from school twice in as many months by skinheads, who in one instance waved a baseball bat at him.

“I hate this place,” she said. “It’s not that I hate living here, but I hate what we go through. I guess it’s just a sign of the times.”

Prevention Tactics

The hate incidents, both large and small, have prompted civic leaders and experts to reassess the county’s crisis-oriented approach to intolerance.

“When something goes wrong between groups, we tend to call in the diversity doctors--the mediators. We say, ‘Come fix this,’ ” said Callahan of Orange County Together. “But the model we have to go to is teaching the school board members, administrators, business leaders and individuals to do something before there’s a problem. The responsibility lies with the individual.”

Orange County “sees itself as a homogenous place because historically it was more homogenous,” she said. “But the reality is people’s neighborhoods have changed, their schools have changed, their workplaces have changed.”

Huntington Beach City Council members are crafting a policy that publicly condemns any acts of hate. It will be presented to school board members and business owners for their signatures.

The city is drafting brochures to be distributed throughout Huntington Beach that explain the policy and inform people about whom to call and where to go if they are harassed.

“It takes good people at a very early stage to say something,” said Huntington Beach Councilwoman Shirley S. Dettloff, who has helped spearhead the drive for the policy. “Their voices must be very loud and very clear, that everyone is going to be treated equally.”

Dettloff said the policy “reaches out to people who are isolated, who this happens to, and says, ‘Don’t be afraid. There are thousands of people who will stand behind you. Notify the police. Our schools and our businesses and citizens are standing behind you.’ ”

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Reacting to Hate

What should bystanders do if they witness a hate incident or hear derogatory speech? Here’s what three experts say:

Joyce Greenspan, Executive director, Anti-Defamation League for Orange County and Long Beach

“I know that when I’ve been confronted with a Jewish American princess joke, or a joke that someone thinks is funny that has to do with different races, I’ll just really look at them personally and say, ‘You know, I have trouble with that joke. This is something that is offensive to me. It also is demeaning, and I don’t think it’s funny.’

“But you don’t want to walk into a dangerous situation. For instance, if a skinhead on the street goes, ‘Heil Hitler’ when someone who they think is Jewish is walking by, a passerby tends not to get involved. But you could let a store owner know, or let the local police know that someone is saying unsavory things. Certainly the police would want to know if there’s someone loitering who is using that language, because it becomes harassment.”

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Dennis Westbrook, Director, Martin Luther King Dispute Resolution Center in Los Angeles

“People have to be willing to risk a bit, to intervene. There’s something personal that each of us can do when we encounter those kinds of incidents. It may be as simple as expressing, verbally, our disapproval of that kind of action. The other part is, if it borders on a violation of the law, be willing to say, ‘If you need a witness, have the police contact me.’

“Those kinds of things do indicate to the victim and to the larger community that there are people who are willing to step forward and say, ‘This is inappropriate.’ It takes guts. We generally don’t want to get involved.”

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Marcia Choo, Director, Asian Pacific Dispute Resolution Center in Los Angeles

“I think it takes incredible courage to step in. As the most direct victim, you’re almost embarrassed by people’s awkwardness and silence. You feel a sense of shame and anger and embarrassment. Maybe we should have some kind of social pact where people ask [the victim], ‘Are you OK? Is there something I can do?’

“Given we live in a society where people blow you away for cutting them off on the freeway, why would you want to involve yourself? But I think, minimally, we can ask that person, ‘Are you OK? Walk away with me.’ ”