One wonders if Chad Martin Jurjaks believes it was worth it: two years and eight months in state prison for yelling “Fucking Mexicans” at a 42-year-old Latino man and his 26-year-old nephew before punching them outside a 7-Eleven in Costa Mesa last March. The Caucasian brawler is just lucky he did not get what prosecutors recommended for the unprovoked attack: four years behind bars.
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Deputy District Attorney Andrew Katz argued for that sentence because of the violent nature of the attack and Jurjak's violent past. Jurjaks no doubt received the lighter sentence because he copped last month to two felony
counts of hate crime battery causing injury. With a sentencing
enhancement prosecutors originally filed alleging a prior strike conviction
for
criminal threats in 2006, Jurjaks was looking at up to seven years and
four months in a state prison cell.
He was drunk around 10:30 p.m.
March 15, 2011, when he approached four family members at the convenience store and yelled, “Fucking Mexicans!” Before they could respond, Jurjaks beat the
head of the 42-year-old three times, then did the same once to his
nephew while still yammering, “Fucking Mexicans!” He eventually walked away, Costa Mesa cops were called, and Jurjaks was arrested near the store.
The younger victim submitted a statement to the judge at sentencing today that he remains in therapy and is still afraid to go outside because the Costa Mesa man beat on him for no reason other than his ethnicity. Too bad the judge can't reduce that sentence in hell as well.
Previous coverage:
This 2006 story predicted hate crimes rising in Costa Mesa:
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.