Long Beach beating trial has slow start

As nearly 40 parents and supporters waited for hours outside a Long Beach courtroom Tuesday for the start of the trial of 10 black youths charged with a Halloween night attack on three white women, talk in the hallway was of how the accusations couldn’t be true.

Some claimed that the defendants -- a male teen and nine girls ages 12 to 17 -- were wrongly identified and not involved in the attack. They said the youths were among hundreds at or near a block party in the predominantly white upscale Bixby Knolls neighborhood.

And the supporters said prosecutors disregarded the accused youths’ account that a trash-talking volley between a group of male youths and three young women near a huge haunted house and street party escalated into a brawl only after one of the victims slapped a black girl uninvolved in the initial exchange. In addition, the original exchange was “more sexual than about race,” said the father of one girl on trial.

What’s more, the parents and friends of the defendants insisted that the accused male actually prevented one victim from getting hit in the head a second time with a skateboard. Those accounts were sharply at odds with official reports, along with a story published in the Long Beach Press-Telegram. In that newspaper’s account, the women, whose full names were not divulged, said they were confronted by a group of about 12 males before and after they went through the haunted house. As the size of the crowd grew, the women were hit with lemons and small pumpkins.

Then came a series of anti-white epithets and, in a matter of minutes, the women had been set upon by the crowd, while onlookers did nothing to stop the attack.

According to the newspaper, the women were beaten, one of them to unconsciousness. One of the women was smashed in the head with a skateboard and kicked, while the other two were pummeled in the face and body. At that point, a passerby -- whose name was not released by police -- started pulling the attackers off the women.

Eight of the charged youths have hate-crime allegations filed against them along with felony assault counts. The district attorney has alleged that anti-white insults hurled during the attack indicate it was racially motivated. Two others, including a 12-year-old girl, were charged only with the felony assault count.

All remain in custody. Two other teenage boys have been arrested but will be tried separately.

More than an hour after the court was to convene at 1:30 p.m., anxiety swirled down the brimming court hallway as word spread that two youths had been offered a lighter sentence in exchange for pleading guilty.

In fact, the youngest of the accused, a 12-year-old girl, almost agreed at her lawyer’s urging to plead guilty to the felony in return for walking out of the courthouse Tuesday. But her parents got into an argument with the attorney, and they and other lawyers said her mother and father convinced their daughter not to plead guilty to a crime she insists she did not commit.

The deal would have barred her from testifying later in defense of her three accused siblings, several attorneys said.

She was among the 10 youths assembled in court when the trial finally did start at 3:20 p.m. It lasted just over an hour before a defense attorney asked that proceedings break until 1:15 p.m. today.

The case is logistically complicated, involving 10 youths, 11 attorneys, 11 bailiffs and the judge.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Gibson W. Lee had to relocate the case from his own trial court to a larger one. Just getting all the trial parties in the same room at once, he said, had taken most of the day. (The trial was originally scheduled to start at 8:30 a.m.)

Five youths sat in the jury box, and five attorneys sat in front of them; five more accused youths sat shackled together in a row behind the attorney table. Their attorneys couldn’t all reach their clients to confer during the brief proceeding, which was dominated by motions to get the youths out of shackles (denied, for security reasons) and moved closer to their lawyers (granted).

The case has raised emotions in and out of Long Beach. On Tuesday, the judge preliminarily granted the prosecutor’s request that its first witness, a black woman, be referred to only as Jane Doe -- even though she’s an adult and a defense attorney argued that the law only protects the names of juveniles and adult sex-crime victims.

The witness will return to the stand today but testified about the general scene before the attack, and amid repeated defense objections, got so far as to say she felt unsafe around the crowd, went back to her car and from there saw a group of black youths attack three white women after they had been pelted with objects.

Because the defendants are minors, a judge will render the verdicts. If convicted, the defendants face punishments ranging from probation to confinement in the state prison system for minors.

Relatives of the 10 on trial Tuesday said they are good children who have no criminal records.

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nancy.wride@latimes.com