3 Athletes Hurt in Allegedly Racial Brawl

Three members of the troubled Ventura College men’s basketball program received minor injuries during a brawl Thursday night after a group of young whites allegedly yelled supremacist slogans and racial taunts to draw the black athletes into a fight, police said Friday.

Three Ventura residents--two with gang connections--were cited on suspicion of misdemeanor battery shortly after at least 15 people fought with fists and pepper spray in an east Ventura apartment playground and parking lot, said Ventura Police Sgt. Bob Velez.

“Witnesses pointed out the white guys as having provoked a fight with the black guys,” Velez said. “They were yelling things like ‘white pride’ and ‘white power’ and referring to the college players with the N-word.”

However, the tenant of the nearby apartment from which the white men came to confront the black players said Friday that the fight started when a player struck her female roommate in the stomach.

“I didn’t hear no ‘white power’ racial stuff,” said Valerie Morehead, 22, who rents an apartment just across a small playground from the basketball players’ home.

And contrary to the players’ accounts, she said a group of about 30 people had gathered at her apartment not for a loud party but to memorialize a friend, Nicholas Dowey, who was killed in a fight outside an Ojai party a week ago.

Morehead said it was the players who started the confrontation, and not her friends. Three players came to her door a few minutes before the fight, and she told them to go away, she said.

“We weren’t having a party, we were having a gathering,” Morehead said. “I still don’t know why they came over here.”

The incident was the latest in a series of setbacks for once-vaunted Ventura College men’s basketball program, whose reputation was tarnished this year amid a series of recruiting violations.

State community college officials are considering whether to strip the team of its final state title in 1995-96.

According to police accounts, Thursday night’s brawl ended about eight minutes after it started at 9:01 p.m., when three police cruisers responded and broke up a fight between six to eight basketball players and at least 10 young whites. Some of the white men had apparently been drinking alcohol, Velez said.

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Basketball players Shawn Young and Adrian Coffey, both 19, and Jonathan Cooper, 21, received bumps and bruises during the fight but did not require medical treatment. They said two attackers used “mace” on them, swung baseball bats, threw beer bottles at their front door and smashed a sliding glass door by hurling a mountain bike through it.

“I came to school for an education, I didn’t come to school to get this,” said B.J. Rogers, one of several basketball players at the fight.

“I’m from the projects,” he said. “If I wanted to be a thug, I could have stayed home.”

Basketball Coach Glen Hefferman, who took over the Ventura College program last month, said he was saddened by the incident. “Right now I’m really sorry that I dragged these young men into such a mess.”

Hefferman was referring to the six players he had just recruited and who were the subject of the taunts.

The players, who live in the Citrus Tree apartment, said they intended to sleep in shifts for protection Friday night. They said they also face the threat of eviction from the apartment manager and have been charged for the broken window.

Police cited Julie Nikkol Ruge, the 21-year-old roommate of Morehead, and two of her guests--Steven Dale Jenkins, 20, and Jacob Robert Woodstock, 21--on suspicion of simple battery. They were not arrested, Velez said, because the situation was under control when police left.

The suspects, none of whom could be reached for comment, are scheduled to be arraigned Oct. 15 and each faces a potential maximum sentence of six months in jail and a $2,000 fine if convicted.

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Jenkins, whom Velez described as an associate of a midtown Ventura white supremacist gang, has previously been arrested on suspicion of disorderly conduct. Velez said Woodstock is identified in police gang files as “a wannabe” to a local Latino gang.

But Morehead said the incident was not prompted by her guests, and was not racially motivated.

“I think they think it’s a racial thing, but I think they better get off it,” she said. “If it was white power, there wouldn’t have been Mexican people at my house.”

She said that the incident developed over a few minutes after the three players came to her door. The players retreated to a swing set near her apartment and sat there looking angry. “You can tell when somebody wants to start a fight with you,” Morehead said.

Soon after, as the gathering was breaking up, Morehead said, her roommate, Ruge, approached the three men and said, “We don’t want problems with you.” When she and others asked them to go back to their apartment a few doors away, the two groups began arguing, she said.

That was when one of the basketball players, whom Morehead said she could not identify, slugged Ruge and the fight was on, she said.

The players tell a different story. They said a few of them were hanging out on their front stoop because it was hot and their apartment has no air-conditioning. They said they could hear slurs from the neighboring apartment.

“They were yelling out ‘white power!’ and ‘niggers’ and whatever,” Coffey said. “They were yelling out loud enough that we could hear.”

The players said they called over to the gathering and asked guests to keep their comments down. At that point, the guests confronted them, the players said.

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They said they recognized one of the angry neighbors as the same man who had picked a fight on campus two weeks ago with another black student, who is a friend of the basketball players.

“He was one of the guys at the party screaming out racial slurs,” Coffey said.

Ruge stuck her finger into one player’s chest, he brushed it away, and the fight began, the players said. When a couple of men began to spray “mace,” players retreated into the house and called police, they said.

“They tried to kick down the door,” Rogers said. “That’s how the bike got thrown through the window.”

On Friday, Hefferman expressed frustration at nagging problems he has found at the Ventura campus since taking the head coaching job.

He said he has been disappointed by the lack of support his team has received both on and off campus.

“It seems like we’re fighting battles at school,” he said. “Now we’ve got to literally fight white supremacist groups.”

Staff writer Vince Kowalick and correspondent David Greenberg contributed to this story.

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