City leaders worry about hate crime revival

Bryce Alderton

Outraged city leaders say they will not let Huntington Beach regress

to the days when hate and prejudice ran rampant and local youth were

drawn into neo-Nazi and skinhead gangs.

Their renewed vigor to teach tolerance was brought on by an alleged

hate crime last week, in which a Filipino man was reportedly beaten by

three teenagers wielding metal pipes.

City Council members say flooding schools with more programs to teach

students tolerance is imperative to prevent future hate crimes, like the

one police suspect left a store manager bruised and terrified Saturday.

The 25-year-old Huntington Beach resident, Aris Gadduang, was working

behind the 99 Cents Only store he manages on Springdale Street when he

was hit on the arms, neck and head by three 14-year-old boys, all

carrying metal pipes, police said.

The teenagers shouted the words “white power,” and began taunting

Gadduang with ethnic slurs, said Huntington Beach Police Lt. Richard

Butcher.

“They gave him a Nazi-style one-arm salute, hit him on the head from

behind and threatened to kill him,” Butcher said.

Police arrested the three teens a block away from the store. They are

being held at the Orange County Juvenile Hall on suspicion of felony

assault with a deadly weapon, criminal threats and interfering with an

individual’s civil rights, Butcher said. No charges have been filed.

City leaders were quick to denounce the attack and to call for more

education to halt the spread of intolerance and hatred among the city’s

youth.

Acts of hatred such as this suggest that school and community leaders

are failing to teach children tolerance, said Mayor Debbie Cook.

“We don’t teach [tolerance]. We think we do, but we don’t nip it in

the bud,” Cook said. “Predominantly in junior high and high school, kids

feel inadequate and are the most vulnerable. We need to get into the

schools. I feel everybody is subjected to [intolerance] at some point.”

Schools in the Huntington Beach City School District require teachers

to take tolerance training courses and character education programs for

students, said Supt. Gary Rutherford.

Adding more educational programs in schools to promote tolerance and

fight existing prejudices will be an essential next step, said

Councilwoman Shirley Dettloff, who is a member of the city’s Human

Relations Task Force. It was formed in the mid-1990s when hate crimes hit

at an all-time high in the city.

“The most important question we have to ask is, ‘Why?”’ Dettloff said.

“I felt sick when I heard about it. We put so much time and effort to

make sure these things don’t happen.” The task force uses grant money to

send middle school students to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and

has sent letters out to other schools to find out what programs they

offer, said task force chairman Fred Provencher.

“Next year we’re looking at setting aside more money to send more

students to [the museum],” Provencher said.

The task force is a city-sponsored volunteer group formed in 1996

after skinheads attacked George Mondragon, an American Indian, near the

Huntington Beach Pier.

Erik Roy Anderson, a 20-year-old Huntington Beach resident at the

time, stabbed the San Bernardino resident 28 times in the head and upper

body.

Mondragon lived, and residents and city leaders vowed to kill the

hatred that dwelt in their city.

Since its inception the task force has been dedicated to educating all

people to tolerate and respect each other’s differences, Dettloff said.

Mondragon’s stabbing was just one in the long line of vicious hate

crimes that Huntington Beach was known for since the 1980s when police

battled a number of white supremacist gangs.

The gangs had about 50 members each, with 50 more skinheads roaming

the streets with no affiliation, according to a police report issued in

November 1989.

The gangs’ activities ranged from unprovoked attacks on minorities to

spraying swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti Downtown where they hung out

and in shopping centers, police said. They also held marches at Central

Park and Downtown.

Hate boiled over in the city again in September 1994 when African

American resident Vernon Windell Flournoy was brutally shot while walking

down Beach Boulevard. Flournoy managed to stumbled into a McDonald’s

before collapsing dead in front of shocked diners.

Two teenagers, Jonathan Russell Kennedy of Huntington Beach and Robert

Wofford of Laguna Niguel, were charged with that racially motivated

slaying. Kennedy was convicted and sentenced to 19 years in prison, said

Orange County District Attorney officials.

Residents and city leaders say they hope that Saturday’s alleged

incident is not an indication of a rising trend in Huntington Beach.

“It’s shocking,” said Frank Katona, 47, who frequents the 99 Cent Only

store on Springdale Street. “I didn’t think it was that dangerous.”

Police Department officials are calling Saturday’s attack “isolated”

and are not aware of any white supremacist groups in the city, said Lt.

Chuck Thomas.

“Any one incident is cause for concern,” Thomas said. “One is too

many, and we will do what we need to do to bring justice.”

Saturday’s attack was the second hate crime reported this year in the

city, police said.

Last year Huntington Beach had 15 reported hate crimes, one of which

came on the heels of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 when an older couple said they were confronted by a man who threatened to kill them

while they were out for a morning walk. A man demanded to know where they

were from and when they told him they were from Iran he told them to go

across the street or he would kill them.

In 2000, the city had 11 reported hate crimes. Numbers recently have

all been down since 1998 when 16 hate crimes were reported, said Lt.

Chuck Thomas.

“It goes up and down every year,” Thomas said. “There hasn’t been a

real set pattern, so it’s hard to make a statistical judgment.”

* BRYCE ALDERTON is the news assistant. He can be reached at (714)

965-7173 or by e-mail at bryce.alderton@latimes.com