Man Charged in Sending Hate E-Mail to Latinos Across U.S.

A 22-year-old Chinese American was charged Thursday with sending threatening Internet e-mail messages to scores of Latino faculty members at Cal State L.A. and to others at universities, corporations and government agencies across the country.

Kingman Quon, who lives with his parents in Corona, has agreed to plead guilty to seven counts of violating a federal hate crime law, prosecutors said. He faces up to seven years in prison.

Quon’s lawyer said his client was remorseful about his actions.

“He just snapped,” said attorney Joseph T. Gibbons Jr. “He was a high achiever student at Cal Poly Pomona and he thought others were getting advantages that he wasn’t. So he vented. He didn’t mean to harm anyone. He wishes he could take it all back.”

One of the targets was state Assemblywoman Gloria Romero (D-Alhambra), a Cal State psychology instructor.

Appearing at a news conference at the U.S. attorney’s office, Romero said she had feared for her life and had become paranoid about fellow faculty members and students after reading the anonymous message that declared: “I hate your race. I want you to die. Kill all wetbacks.”

The message, peppered with obscenities and racial slurs, also threatened to “come down and kill” Romero and the other recipients.

Romero said she had received hate mail before, “but this message stunned me. I felt very vulnerable. I feared for my life. I finally broke down in tears.”

Afterward, she said, she drove from her home to the Cal State campus and found herself “looking over my shoulder” wondering whether the culprit might be someone she knew or an anonymous face in the crowd.

Federal prosecutors said Quon knew none of the victims and obtained their names and e-mail addresses from the Internet.

Romero said the message traumatized her just as if she had been mugged on the street or had found her home ransacked. She couldn’t bring herself to open her e-mail messages for eight months, she said.

Forty-one other Latino Cal State faculty members received the same message on March 7. So did 25 Latino students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Latinos employed at Indiana University, Xerox, the Texas Hispanic Journal, the Internal Revenue Service and NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Quon was tracked down by a special computer crimes squad at the FBI’s Los Angeles office. The messages had been sent under another person’s name.

“We hope that this case sends a message that you cannot hide behind the perceived anonymity of the Internet in committing such crimes,” said Timothy P. McNally, who heads the office.

At his first news conference since being named to head the Los Angeles prosecutor’s office, U.S. Atty. Alejandro N. Mayorkas promised an increased presence in fighting hate crimes in Southern California.

“This office will vigorously prosecute those who threaten the integrity of our system through attacks based on race or national origin,” he said.

Mayorkas said the case represents a convergence of two fast-growing crimes in America: crimes by hate mongers and crimes that involve misuse of computers.

Quon is expected to make his first court appearance Feb. 8. He is charged with threatening to use force against his victims because of their national origin or ethnic background. The offenses are misdemeanors because the victims were not physically harmed.

The case is only the second in the nation in which someone has been prosecuted for sending threatening, racist e-mail, officials say. The other case was also brought by the Los Angeles federal prosecutor’s office.

Richard Machado, a 21-year-old naturalized citizen from El Salvador, was convicted last year of threatening to kill Asian students at UC Irvine. He was sentenced to one year in prison.