Denver Woman Hurt in Apparent Racial Assault

DENVER —  A black woman attacked at a convenience store said her assailants told her they were skinheads and used a racial slur before beating her in the latest in a string of apparent race-based crimes in Colorado.

Shomie Francis, 26, of Aurora told police she was jumped by six people as she was getting food at a 7-Eleven about 2 a.m. Thursday.

Paramedics called to the store treated her for cuts and wounds to her face.

Francis said that when she asked the attackers if they were skinheads, they said yes and started hitting her. She could not say how long the attack lasted.

“To be hit by that many people at once . . . it felt like forever,” she said.

The attackers ran away as 12 police cars pulled up. All six were caught and arrested.

Denver police Sgt. Michael O’Neill said investigators were trying to determine whether Francis’ assailants were skinheads because two had long hair and another was Latino. All six suspects were jailed for investigation of ethnic intimidation and assault.

O’Neill said, “To call it a beating would be an exaggeration.” But Andrew Hudson, a spokesman for Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, called the incident “an atrocious act of violence, and we’re determined to prosecute those involved.”

The attack prompted the Denver NAACP to schedule a news conference for next week to announce its recommendations for dealing with the wave of hate crimes that have shaken Colorado.

On Monday, more than 1,000 people attended an anti-hate rally in downtown Denver to denounce recent violence blamed on white supremacists.

Concern about hate crimes erupted this month after the fatal shootings of a Denver police officer and a West African man by young men with ties to white supremacists.

Police Officer Bruce Vander Jagt was killed Nov. 12 in a shootout with a member of a group called the Denver Skins. The attacker then killed himself with the officer’s gun.

On Nov. 19, Oumar Dia was gunned down at a bus stop and a nurse who tried to help him was shot in the back, a wound that left her paralyzed. One of the two suspects arrested in the attack describes himself as a skinhead and said in television interviews that he shot Dia because he was black.

Skinheads have been linked to racist groups, although some deny involvement with white supremacists, saying they are aligned with a movement of working-class youths in Britain.

The violence has spread as far as Grand Junction, 250 miles west of Denver, where two homeless men and a 15-year-old boy, all white, were accused of ethnic intimidation after a confrontation with a black man from Colorado Springs on Monday.