4 Charged in N.Y. Assault on 3 Black Men

Four white teen-agers were charged with assault today in the beatings of three black men stranded in a predominantly white neighborhood. One of the blacks was fatally struck by a car as he fled.

Six other males, ages 16 to 18, and a 15-year-old girl were in custody but had not been charged in connection with the attack early Saturday, said police spokesman Mike Julian of the 106th Precinct in Queens. He did not disclose their names.

Fearful of other incidents in the neighborhood in the wake of the attack, police assigned extra officers to patrol the area.

Julian said all of the youths taken into custody were at a party Friday night in the Howard Beach section of Queens. He said three of the teen-agers left the party at one point, encountered the three black men whose car had broken down on a nearby highway and words were exchanged.

Tracked 3 Blacks

The three white youths returned to the party to get some friends, and they went out looking for the three blacks, according to Julian. One of the whites was carrying a tree limb and a baseball bat, he said.

They tracked the blacks down to a nearby pizzeria shortly before 1 a.m. Saturday. One of the blacks, Timothy Grimes, 18, got away after being struck once.

But Michael Griffith, 22, and Cedric Sandiford, 36, were chased and beaten until they slipped through a hole in the fence of the Belt Parkway.

Griffith, trying to cross the parkway, was struck by a car and killed.

The gang fled, and no charges were filed against the driver.

‘Like a Lynch Mob’

“The intention was to kill both of us,” Sandiford said in an interview published in today’s editions of New York Newsday. “It was like a lynch mob. Like something that would happen in the days of slavery.”

The attackers, using a racial epithet, told the blacks they were in the “wrong neighborhood,” Sandiford said. “I was hollering, ‘God, don’t kill us!’ ”

Griffith, a construction foreman, lived with his mother and two sisters in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. His mother, Jean, said he had planned to marry his high school sweetheart, Tyra Lewis, who is two months pregnant with their child.