Slaying of Latino Teenager in Utah Sets Off Debate

When Bernardo Repreza moved from North Hollywood three months ago to live with his father in Salt Lake City, his family thought he would be safe from street gangs.

They did not imagine that they would be burying the 15-year-old in the Hollywood Hills today, two weeks after he was beaten and stabbed to death in a brawl with 30 Straight Edge skinheads--a white, middle-class gang that espouses violence as well as vegetarianism, abstinence from drugs, alcohol and premarital sex. Nor could they have predicted the controversy sparked by Bernardo’s death, as city officials and Salt Lake City activists debate whether the slaying was motivated by gang rivalry or racial hatred.

Salt Lake City police have arrested two suspects--both high school seniors, one of them a juvenile. But police have denied allegations that the slaying was racially motivated and have cast it as a gang fight.

“What’s the primary motive?” said a Salt Lake City police source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “These kids were just upset with each other. This wasn’t a group looking for victims of their racism.”

That view angers many community activists, who say that police are more interested in preserving Salt Lake City’s image than determining the truth about a potential hate crime.

“The Olympics are coming here in 2002,” said Mike Martinez, a local lawyer and Latino activist. “No one wants the perception that in Salt Lake people can be killed just because of the color of their skin.”

As the battle rages on in Utah, family members and friends in Los Angeles grieved over their loss and spoke fondly of the boy who aspired to become a Marine and who touched many who knew him.

Gordon Clayton, Bernardo’s stepfather, said the family had to hold two funerals--one today and the other last Wednesday in Utah--to accommodate all of Bernardo’s friends. More than 300 people attended the funeral at a Mormon church in Salt Lake City.

Friends at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, where Bernardo was a student until he moved to Utah, described him as a gregarious ladies man.

“He said he wanted to be a model, and he had the looks,” said 15-year-old Brenda Najeia, who met Bernardo in a world history class. Brenda said Bernardo was always dapper and always above the fray, avoiding the gangster lifestyle that swirled around him.

“You should have seen his funeral,” said Cecily Patton, who taught Bernardo in the sixth-grade when he previously lived in Utah. “There were many, many brokenhearted girls of every race crying, and boys as well.”

But detectives, at first calling him a gangster wannabe, said that Bernardo’s many friends may have put him in harm’s way on Halloween night.

“Unfortunately, he associated with gang members,” said Lt. Phil Kirk of the Salt Lake City Police Department. “He was hanging around the wrong people at the wrong time and got caught in the mix of it.”

The people who knew Bernardo said he never wanted to belong to a gang, but that he had friends of every stripe--including gangsters.

Police were holding Colin C. Reesor, 17, and Andrew D. Moench, 18, at the Salt Lake County Jail on $500,000 bail. Moench is accused of clubbing Bernardo with a baseball bat; Reesor is charged with stabbing him. Both have been charged with murder, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison in Utah. Reesor will be tried as an adult.

Officials with the Salt Lake City district attorney’s office said it is unlikely they will press hate crime charges. Under Utah’s state laws, a hate crime turns misdemeanors into felony offenses, but such charges are moot when the crime is already a felony, prosecutors said.