The Weekly's intrepid investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley and I were confused when word came down today that a white supremacist had been sentenced to eight years in prison for an unprovoked assault on a black male outside a Costa Mesa store last December.
Last December? Didn't that incident happen a few years ago?
Turns out we were confusing our unprovoked assaults by white supremacists on black males outside stores in OC's first “Rule of Law City.”
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See, 23-year-old white supremacist Ronald Bray of
Huntington Beach punched the
face of an African American man who was confined to a wheelchair outside a Costa
Mesa convenience store in 2006. (See here.)
White supremacist Ronald Allen Bramlett is 65, his victim was a 16-year-old black boy and they were outside a CVS Pharmacy at 1835
Newport Blvd.
The kid and three friends were standing outside there about 8 p.m. Dec. 29 when Bramlett, whom the group did not know, approached and called the 16-year-old derogatory racial names, including “dirty nigger.”
The white-trash transient also claimed to be a member of a white supremacist gang and that, as such, the 16-year-old had no right to look at him because he has blond hair and blue eyes.
A witness intervened and tried to stand between the boy and Bramlett, telling the old cracker to back off. But Bramlett instead challenged the 16-year-old to a fight, whipped out a knife and threatened the lad by saying, “I'm going to cut you up into little pieces, boy.”
Fortunately, the 16-year-old got out of there, the witness' wife called police and Bramlett was arrested at a nearby store.
Hey, maybe it was Bray's convenience store.
Guess we better get used to the confusion when it comes to cases like this: Costa Mesa cops let it slip during reporting on the first assault that several white supremacist gangs operate in Rule of Lawsville.
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.