Three white men accused of attacking a group of Hispanics in a Los Angeles County park on Sunday were charged with hate crimes this week, the authorities said.
Five Hispanic men were playing soccer and speaking Spanish in Stephen Sorensen Park in Lake Los Angeles, an area roughly 80 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, when they were attacked by Ian Justine Plankey, 20; Richard Lawrence Daulton, 19; and Kevin Matthew Stewart, 25, according to a statement from the office of the Los Angeles County District Attorney, Jackie Lacey.
In an interview with a local newspaper, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy identified the suspects as white supremacists.
“They were screaming racial slurs: ‘Heil Hitler’, ‘AV Skins,’ just numerous racial slurs toward the Hispanics,” the deputy, whose full name was not provided, said in an on-camera interview with The Antelope Valley Times. “One had a Confederate flag wallet, and he kept doing the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.”
The district attorney’s office said the three defendants were charged with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of assault with force likely to cause injury, all felonies. It said the defendants committed the assaults “because of the victims’ status and perceived race or ethnicity.”
The Los Angeles County sheriff’s department declined to comment Thursday night.
All three defendants pleaded not guilty on Tuesday and are scheduled to return to Los Angeles County Superior Court for a preliminary hearing on March 11. The district attorney’s office added that Mr. Stewart had been convicted in 2014 of assault with a firearm.
The alleged attack on Sunday began after the three defendants began verbally harassing the Hispanic men, according to the deputy who spoke to the The Antelope Valley Times. He said the confrontation soon escalated into an assault with knives. The defendants left the area after a group of Hispanic women intervened and separated them from the Hispanic men, he said, but the three men returned a short time later to attack a second time.
The alleged attack came just a day after a Ku Klux Klan rally in neighboring Orange County descended into a violent melee that left five people injured. Southern California has also faced an uptick in bias incidents against Muslims and Sikhs in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attacks.
Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said that the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups had experienced “significant growth” both in California and nationwide since the debates last year over lowering the Confederate flags in Southern states.
The number of hate groups across the country rose by 14 percent in 2015, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which said there are now 190 chapters of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. The report said that the sometimes caustic rhetoric of the Republican presidential candidates had inflamed anxieties over the country’s changing demographics.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/05/us/hate-crime-charges-lake-los-angeles-california.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FHate%20Crimes&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=49&pgtype=collection