Name: Anonymous 2009-11-30 23:19
Slater Slums Smackdown
What do you get when four skinheads stab a Mexican in Huntington Beach’s Oak View barrio? Four beat-up skinheads facing hate-crime charges
Beatriz called the Huntington Beach Police Department dispatch center at 11:55 p.m., as July 3 turned into the nation’s birthday and the city prepared for a weekend of drunken revelers.
“Por favor, la policia,” she cried to the officer on the other line. The police, please. A red truck had circled a couple of times around the city’s Oak View barrio where Beatriz (her name, as well as those of the other victims on this night, have been changed to protect their identities) lived, arousing the suspicion of residents. Four people sat inside—all white. No way a group of gabachos was visiting Oak View late at night unless they wanted trouble.
Suddenly, the truck roared into an alley connecting Queens and Keelson lanes. Three men jumped out and began pummeling Beatriz’s husband, Jose, who was standing outside with friends. As she talked to the dispatcher, Beatriz began screaming: They had pulled a knife. They sported white-supremacist tattoos—swastikas, life runes, SS-style lightning bolts—and shaved heads. Skinheads.
“Motherfucking Mexicans!” one yelled, while a woman inside the truck shouted, “Stab him! Stab him!” Another stabbed Jose three times in the chest, and the three men began kicking and punching him once he slumped to the ground. Beatriz was hysterical; she had stopped making sense to the dispatcher.
A squad car arrived at the scene within two minutes. But the residents of Oak View had already taken justice into their own hands. The moment the three white supremacists attacked Jose, Johnny ran to his apartment, where friends and family relaxed. “Jose is getting jumped!” he hollered. They rushed out and poured into the alley. Others heard the commotion and rushed the skinheads. No weapons were needed for this, a good, old-fashioned ass-whuppin’.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Punches and kicks and body slams and scratches. The skinheads tried to cram themselves back into the truck, but two didn’t make it. Another did, but some of Johnny’s friends pulled the attacker out of the window and thrashed him anew. Sirens wailed in the distance, but the skins somehow broke free and sped off into the night.
Patrolmen stopped the truck about 10 minutes later, two miles from the crime scene, at the corner of Golden West Street and Little Harbor Drive. Jose was taken to UC Irvine Medical Center to treat his wounds, but the skinheads were nearly as badly injured. One had a dislocated shoulder; another, a black eye. All had cuts, bruises and torn T-shirts.
Police arrested the men—Michael Powell, 21, of Anaheim; 30-year-old Riverside resident Bret Hicks; and Brian Hanson, 26, of Santa Ana—for assault with a deadly weapon. Also processed was 24-year-old Erin Brooks, of Huntington Beach, who lustily cheered on her friends as they brutalized Jose. The Mexicans who had beaten them up? Surf City’s finest didn’t give any of the Oak View residents so much as a warning over the incident.
Hicks, Hanson and Powell now languish in Orange County Central Jail, while Brooks is free on $100,000 bail. All face felony counts of attempted murder and hate-crime enhancements; each faces at least a decade in prison if found guilty of the latter count. The four maintain their innocence against the charges, but they don’t deny they assaulted Jose that Fourth of July weekend. Instead, their lawyers and supporters are trying to portray the quartet as the victims. Furthermore, their lawyers are trying to convince a judge that their clients deserve a plea bargain once offered by the district attorney’s office—offered before evidence emerged suggesting that the assault on Jose wasn’t a random fight but a brutal, premeditated crime.
No one involved with the case will speak to the Weekly. The scene described above was taken from police logs, pretrial testimony, and statements by attorneys and prosecutors in open court. Those sources, plus interviews with Oak View residents, hundreds of pages of public records and hours of recordings uncovered by the Weekly, reveal at least one truth: This crew of skinheads picked the worst possible neighborhood in Huntington Beach to wage their racial holy war.
* * *
Even among the barrios of Orange County, the Oak View community is notorious, a modern-day Hell’s Kitchen just 10 minutes from the beach. Bordered by Warner and Slater avenues to the north and south, Beach Boulevard to the east and Nichols Street to the west, plopped in the middle of abandoned businesses and car shops, it’s roughly 1 square mile swarming with more than 6,000 people, the overwhelming number of them immigrant Latinos.
Only a few single-family homes dot the neighborhood; the vast majority of dwellings in Oak View are apartments, with dozens of different complexes in various states of disrepair owned by absentee landlords. No street spans the length of the neighborhood inside its boundaries, leading to a tangle of cul-de-sacs and dead ends occasionally connected by alleys. A 2006 study by UCI’s Department of Policy, Planning and Design found the average household here consists of 5.5 members with a median income of $32,000. Twenty-five percent of residents older than 25 have a high-school diploma.
At night, the neighborhood becomes a dark maze where drug peddlers operate and one wrong turn can lead to a confrontation. It’s a place that unfortunately knows too much crime—and not just coming from the South Side Huntington Beach gang that has ruled its streets with near-impunity for decades. In 2001, Huntington Beach officer Mark Wersching killed unarmed 18-year-old Antonio Saldivar while pursuing another suspect. Although the district attorney’s office declined to file criminal charges against Wersching, Saldivar’s family sued and won a $2.1 million judgment against the city.
Oak View residents have never forgotten that killing, despite years of outreach by the department and the Orange County Human Relations Committee. They still complain that police harass them for no good reason while turning a blind eye to actual crime in the neighborhood.
“I’ve called the cops so many times about drug dealers on the streets, but they never seem to come,” says Lucio, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in the Slater Slums for 15 years. (He declined to give his full name.) He was standing on the corner of Slater and Keelson, where day laborers gather daily under a sign reading, “No Solicitation.” “But if they see boys hanging around? They stop them, harass them and take off.”
Others in the group agreed. “You hear sirens all the time,” says a younger man who refused to identify himself but sported a shaved head and an MMA-style T-shirt. “They like to fuck with us. Maybe if they stopped fucking with us and actually went after cholos, this barrio would be better.”
Few outside of Oak View even call the community by that name; its countywide designation is the Slater Slums, an epithet that dates back to the 1980s, when Latinos and Vietnamese began moving into the community and its traditional working-class white residents left. Press coverage of the area invariably veers toward the negative; a 1991 Orange County Register story headline simply called Oak View a “scary Huntington neighborhood.”
But those who live in the Slater Slums nevertheless take pride in their barrio. Its home school is Oak View Elementary, which made last year’s California Distinguished Schools list. The humble Oak View Community Center brims with teens playing basketball and adults dutifully taking English classes and participating in free workshops. A host of nonprofits offers services to residents.
“Yeah, there’s crime here,” Lucio says. “But we’re good people here. We want a better life. We want services. We want attention. We want good.”
Although he lives across the street from where Jose’s assault happened, he claims to know nothing about it. “I read about in [the Register’s Spanish-language weekly] Excelsior a couple of months later,” he says. “I’m just surprised the police didn’t arrest the Mexicans.”
One guy who claimed to know about the assault is Justin, a young man in his 20s. “I wasn’t there, but some of my homies helped kick their asses,” he says. He wouldn’t offer any more details other than this: “We were surprised the police didn’t arrest us, too. But I think they were probably as happy as us that the Nazis got their asses kicked.”
* * *
July 3 wasn’t the first time Jose’s assailants had run afoul of the law. Powell was already awaiting trial for stabbing someone last year in Huntington Beach, while Hanson served four years in state prison earlier this decade for assault with a deadly weapon and robbery. Brooks received three years’ probation in 2005 for being in a car driven by infamous neo-Nazi hitman Billy Joe Johnson that carried the corpse of a man Johnson had just murdered. Hicks had done prison time for attempted murder, car theft and assaulting a peace officer. All were associates of Public Enemy Number One (PEN1), the white-supremacist gang that local and federal prosecutors have been trying to shut down for years. Detectives say Powell is a member of the Orange County Skins, while Hicks claims to be a member of the Golden State Skins and has on his neck a valknot tattoo, three interlocking triangles associated with the United Society of Aryan Skinheads prison gang. Brooks, the mother of an infant, has “White” and “Power” tattooed on her legs and was formerly married to a PEN1 member.
http://www.ocweekly.com/2009-11-26/news/slater-slums-smackdown-huntington-beach-oak-view-barrio/
What do you get when four skinheads stab a Mexican in Huntington Beach’s Oak View barrio? Four beat-up skinheads facing hate-crime charges
Beatriz called the Huntington Beach Police Department dispatch center at 11:55 p.m., as July 3 turned into the nation’s birthday and the city prepared for a weekend of drunken revelers.
“Por favor, la policia,” she cried to the officer on the other line. The police, please. A red truck had circled a couple of times around the city’s Oak View barrio where Beatriz (her name, as well as those of the other victims on this night, have been changed to protect their identities) lived, arousing the suspicion of residents. Four people sat inside—all white. No way a group of gabachos was visiting Oak View late at night unless they wanted trouble.
Suddenly, the truck roared into an alley connecting Queens and Keelson lanes. Three men jumped out and began pummeling Beatriz’s husband, Jose, who was standing outside with friends. As she talked to the dispatcher, Beatriz began screaming: They had pulled a knife. They sported white-supremacist tattoos—swastikas, life runes, SS-style lightning bolts—and shaved heads. Skinheads.
“Motherfucking Mexicans!” one yelled, while a woman inside the truck shouted, “Stab him! Stab him!” Another stabbed Jose three times in the chest, and the three men began kicking and punching him once he slumped to the ground. Beatriz was hysterical; she had stopped making sense to the dispatcher.
A squad car arrived at the scene within two minutes. But the residents of Oak View had already taken justice into their own hands. The moment the three white supremacists attacked Jose, Johnny ran to his apartment, where friends and family relaxed. “Jose is getting jumped!” he hollered. They rushed out and poured into the alley. Others heard the commotion and rushed the skinheads. No weapons were needed for this, a good, old-fashioned ass-whuppin’.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Punches and kicks and body slams and scratches. The skinheads tried to cram themselves back into the truck, but two didn’t make it. Another did, but some of Johnny’s friends pulled the attacker out of the window and thrashed him anew. Sirens wailed in the distance, but the skins somehow broke free and sped off into the night.
Patrolmen stopped the truck about 10 minutes later, two miles from the crime scene, at the corner of Golden West Street and Little Harbor Drive. Jose was taken to UC Irvine Medical Center to treat his wounds, but the skinheads were nearly as badly injured. One had a dislocated shoulder; another, a black eye. All had cuts, bruises and torn T-shirts.
Police arrested the men—Michael Powell, 21, of Anaheim; 30-year-old Riverside resident Bret Hicks; and Brian Hanson, 26, of Santa Ana—for assault with a deadly weapon. Also processed was 24-year-old Erin Brooks, of Huntington Beach, who lustily cheered on her friends as they brutalized Jose. The Mexicans who had beaten them up? Surf City’s finest didn’t give any of the Oak View residents so much as a warning over the incident.
Hicks, Hanson and Powell now languish in Orange County Central Jail, while Brooks is free on $100,000 bail. All face felony counts of attempted murder and hate-crime enhancements; each faces at least a decade in prison if found guilty of the latter count. The four maintain their innocence against the charges, but they don’t deny they assaulted Jose that Fourth of July weekend. Instead, their lawyers and supporters are trying to portray the quartet as the victims. Furthermore, their lawyers are trying to convince a judge that their clients deserve a plea bargain once offered by the district attorney’s office—offered before evidence emerged suggesting that the assault on Jose wasn’t a random fight but a brutal, premeditated crime.
No one involved with the case will speak to the Weekly. The scene described above was taken from police logs, pretrial testimony, and statements by attorneys and prosecutors in open court. Those sources, plus interviews with Oak View residents, hundreds of pages of public records and hours of recordings uncovered by the Weekly, reveal at least one truth: This crew of skinheads picked the worst possible neighborhood in Huntington Beach to wage their racial holy war.
* * *
Even among the barrios of Orange County, the Oak View community is notorious, a modern-day Hell’s Kitchen just 10 minutes from the beach. Bordered by Warner and Slater avenues to the north and south, Beach Boulevard to the east and Nichols Street to the west, plopped in the middle of abandoned businesses and car shops, it’s roughly 1 square mile swarming with more than 6,000 people, the overwhelming number of them immigrant Latinos.
Only a few single-family homes dot the neighborhood; the vast majority of dwellings in Oak View are apartments, with dozens of different complexes in various states of disrepair owned by absentee landlords. No street spans the length of the neighborhood inside its boundaries, leading to a tangle of cul-de-sacs and dead ends occasionally connected by alleys. A 2006 study by UCI’s Department of Policy, Planning and Design found the average household here consists of 5.5 members with a median income of $32,000. Twenty-five percent of residents older than 25 have a high-school diploma.
At night, the neighborhood becomes a dark maze where drug peddlers operate and one wrong turn can lead to a confrontation. It’s a place that unfortunately knows too much crime—and not just coming from the South Side Huntington Beach gang that has ruled its streets with near-impunity for decades. In 2001, Huntington Beach officer Mark Wersching killed unarmed 18-year-old Antonio Saldivar while pursuing another suspect. Although the district attorney’s office declined to file criminal charges against Wersching, Saldivar’s family sued and won a $2.1 million judgment against the city.
Oak View residents have never forgotten that killing, despite years of outreach by the department and the Orange County Human Relations Committee. They still complain that police harass them for no good reason while turning a blind eye to actual crime in the neighborhood.
“I’ve called the cops so many times about drug dealers on the streets, but they never seem to come,” says Lucio, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in the Slater Slums for 15 years. (He declined to give his full name.) He was standing on the corner of Slater and Keelson, where day laborers gather daily under a sign reading, “No Solicitation.” “But if they see boys hanging around? They stop them, harass them and take off.”
Others in the group agreed. “You hear sirens all the time,” says a younger man who refused to identify himself but sported a shaved head and an MMA-style T-shirt. “They like to fuck with us. Maybe if they stopped fucking with us and actually went after cholos, this barrio would be better.”
Few outside of Oak View even call the community by that name; its countywide designation is the Slater Slums, an epithet that dates back to the 1980s, when Latinos and Vietnamese began moving into the community and its traditional working-class white residents left. Press coverage of the area invariably veers toward the negative; a 1991 Orange County Register story headline simply called Oak View a “scary Huntington neighborhood.”
But those who live in the Slater Slums nevertheless take pride in their barrio. Its home school is Oak View Elementary, which made last year’s California Distinguished Schools list. The humble Oak View Community Center brims with teens playing basketball and adults dutifully taking English classes and participating in free workshops. A host of nonprofits offers services to residents.
“Yeah, there’s crime here,” Lucio says. “But we’re good people here. We want a better life. We want services. We want attention. We want good.”
Although he lives across the street from where Jose’s assault happened, he claims to know nothing about it. “I read about in [the Register’s Spanish-language weekly] Excelsior a couple of months later,” he says. “I’m just surprised the police didn’t arrest the Mexicans.”
One guy who claimed to know about the assault is Justin, a young man in his 20s. “I wasn’t there, but some of my homies helped kick their asses,” he says. He wouldn’t offer any more details other than this: “We were surprised the police didn’t arrest us, too. But I think they were probably as happy as us that the Nazis got their asses kicked.”
* * *
July 3 wasn’t the first time Jose’s assailants had run afoul of the law. Powell was already awaiting trial for stabbing someone last year in Huntington Beach, while Hanson served four years in state prison earlier this decade for assault with a deadly weapon and robbery. Brooks received three years’ probation in 2005 for being in a car driven by infamous neo-Nazi hitman Billy Joe Johnson that carried the corpse of a man Johnson had just murdered. Hicks had done prison time for attempted murder, car theft and assaulting a peace officer. All were associates of Public Enemy Number One (PEN1), the white-supremacist gang that local and federal prosecutors have been trying to shut down for years. Detectives say Powell is a member of the Orange County Skins, while Hicks claims to be a member of the Golden State Skins and has on his neck a valknot tattoo, three interlocking triangles associated with the United Society of Aryan Skinheads prison gang. Brooks, the mother of an infant, has “White” and “Power” tattooed on her legs and was formerly married to a PEN1 member.
http://www.ocweekly.com/2009-11-26/news/slater-slums-smackdown-huntington-beach-oak-view-barrio/