Beaten Gay Man Asks Why

I met Gene on Monday, a week after he says he was kidnapped by two men in a van, beaten over and over, robbed and dumped on a Garden Grove street in the middle of the night. He still had swelling and scars on his face and the whites of his eyes were still a sickly yellow. But at least he looked human again, compared to the Polaroids of his bloodied head taken just after the attack by a skinhead with a goatee and a juvenile accomplice.

Gene is gay. He believes that’s why his tormentors took him for a terror ride two Sundays ago. And that’s why he asked me not to use his last name, though he allowed himself to be photographed. The perpetrators already know what he looks like, but Gene has an unusual last name and a huge family and he wants to shield them from possible retribution.

Police have two men in custody, an adult and a juvenile who they say confessed to the beating, though not the abduction. The suspects are James Ronald Romo, 19, a beefy man with a shaved head and a scary stare in his mug shot, and the teenager.

If convicted, these two should star in a segment of the World’s Dumbest Criminals. Deputies picked up their trail at the Covered Wagon Motel in Buena Park after they answered a page--on the blue translucent beeper stolen from the victim. It seems a woman was desperately trying to reach Gene, a housekeeper, to have her place cleaned. The persistent customer beeped him so incessantly the suspects couldn’t resist and called back, signaling their location on her caller ID.

Investigators aren’t entirely sure of the motive for the attack, or aren’t saying. The violence was so brutal, however, they’re sure it wasn’t your average street mugging.

“The bottom line: They beat the hell out of a human being. They were merciless,” said Sgt. Mark Levy, a supervising detective with the sheriff’s station in Stanton.

Gene says the assailants abducted him from the parking lot of the Acapulco Restaurant on Beach Boulevard. It happened about 11 p.m., he said, as he was leaving the restaurant alone. According to police, however, the assailants say the attack took place outside the Frat House, a gay bar down the street and around the corner from the restaurant.

The assailants stole Gene’s trusty beeper, a hundred bucks, silver rings from every finger on both hands and the silver chain with the face of Jesus hanging from his neck. Gene said they threw him out of their parked van after he pleaded, “In Jesus’ name, please don’t kill me.”

But he still can’t understand why anybody would target a 36-year-old guy who cleans houses for a living and rooms with his parents in a blue-collar barrio.

“Unless somebody wants me murdered for my escobas (brooms) and my dustpan,” wisecracked Gene, who limped into another room to fetch his business card for the Speedy Turtle.

I was surprised to see he hadn’t lost his sense of humor. Later I realized Gene makes everybody laugh.

“Always,” he said, billing himself as the life of the party, the guest who gets everybody dancing. “It’s my nature. I don’t let no one take that joy from my life. God gave it to me and no one can take it away.”

Gene’s story came to light through an L.A.-based project aimed at improving health services for gay men in Orange County. Health workers got wind of it through the grapevine and alerted Eli Reyna of the county’s Human Relations Commission. Soon, reporters and human rights advocates traipsed through his mother’s spare but spotless living room, decorated primarily with pictures of her 16 adult children and 93 grandchildren. A camera crew from “Primer Impacto,” the Spanish-language version of “Hard Copy,” videotaped Gene talking on the porch near a brick grotto with a near-life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary.

During the interviews, other family members remained in the background, too numerous not to notice but amazingly unobtrusive. They ate some aromatic meals at a small kitchen table or went in and out of a mobile home parked at the side of the house. Once, I spotted Gene’s white-haired father, Manuel, walking along the driveway just outside the living room window. But Gene urgently asked me not to talk to him, nervously suggesting something about the old man’s traditional ways.

Believe me, I understand what it means to fear a Mexican father, though this patriarch seemed friendly enough when he answered the phone a couple days later. “I’m going to stay out of the line of fire,” said Manuel, a street paver for 36 years.

Naturally, he felt bad about what happened to his son.

“A father, right or wrong, is going to worry about his family,” said Manuel, born in Watts of parents from Chihuahua. “Some of us [put up a] macho image, but I think sometimes we worry more than the women do.”

Publicity about the attack distressed Gene’s family. After reporters left Monday, one sister complained to him, “Why are you telling everybody you’re gay?”

Gene came out to his family when he was 30. It must have been a shock to some since he had been married for 10 years and fathered three children, two girls and a boy. Gene says he still sees the kids regularly and feels protective.

“Me? They can talk about me, mock me, beat me to the ground. But not my kids,” he said.

His brothers feel protective of him, in turn. On the night of the beating, they rescued Gene from a hospital where he says he had been left bleeding and unattended for more than two hours. Furious, they drove him elsewhere for treatment, the EKG wires still attached to his chest though they had never been connected to the heart monitor. Gene says he didn’t even get gauze or a glass of water.

A week later, one brother was still fuming: “This guy’s a human being. He’s my brother. Any human being should be treated right, but he wasn’t.”

Gene says he still wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. The youngest member of the family, Amador, 20, who has Down syndrome, gave up his bed so his injured brother could sleep near their mother, Carmen, who comforts him in Spanish.

“I thank God I have her,” said Gene. “I’m not ready to sleep by myself. It’s gonna be awhile.”

Carmen was born in Cucamonga and raised Catholic, a religion that teaches homosexuality is a sin. Carmen says she’s still devout, watches Mass on television at dawn and prays aloud every morning in her kitchen, asking God to give her strength. But she has never judged Gene.

“Yo nunca pude despreciarlo. Cada quien tiene su destino, no?” (“I was never capable of rejecting him. We each have our own destiny, no?”)

Carmen believes in miracles. She says God rescued two of her sons from drugs. The family has lived in the same neighborhood for 33 years, a tidy area where gang members grew up alongside law-abiding friends.

Gene, child No. 12, has had a couple scrapes with the law. In 1992, he was charged with assault and discharging a weapon over a shooting in front of his house. He still insists he was trying to help the victim, but he got 31 days in jail and three years probation. He says the case ruined him financially, putting him on the street and ending his career as a fashion model.

“I’m a good person, regardless if I’m broke or gay or homeless,” he said.

When Gene told his family he was gay, his father admits he wondered what went wrong. But he realized there was nothing he could do to change it.

“It don’t bother me,” he started to say, then took it back. “Well, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. But it’s not gonna kill me. . . . He’s here. He’s my son. You gotta accept him how he is.”

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com