Keith MayIt's been nearly 10 years since the gruesome death of 17-year-old Steven Woods, but the media's depiction of South County Latinos as gangbangers hasn't changed a bit. Woods, you'll recall, died in late 1993 after he and his Anglo friends clashed with a group of young Latinos at a San Clemente park. One of the Latinos threw a paint roller at Woods, puncturing his skull and putting him in a coma from which he never awoke.
A race-baiting press immediately characterized the six Latino students convicted of Woods' death as “street terrorists.” The blowback was so powerful that backers of 1994's Proposition 187 used Woods' death as proof that Latino gangsters, most of them here illegally, were indiscriminately killing white teens.
Now let's welcome Brown Peril, Part Dos: In the early hours of July 31, four Marines fought with a group of other men in a desolate stretch of San Juan Capistrano. When the melee cleared, Marines Carter D. Caroom, 23, and Randall Roach, 22, lay on the ground with serious stab wounds as their assailants fled the scene.
The attackers' identities and ethnicities remain unknown, but an initial Sheriff's Department report pegged them as “gang members.” Hours later, however, the Sheriff's Department corrected itself: there was no evidence that anybody involved in the fight was a gang member. Southern California-based City News Service reported the correction, saying that the gang-affiliation claim, according to sheriff's deputies, “was erroneous or based on speculation.”
But this correction got in the way of what was clearly a more exciting story. Most of the local and even national media continued to report that the men who beat up the Marines were rampaging cholos. KNBC-TV 4's website (http://www.nbc4.tv/news/2371686/detail.html) published at 6:59 a.m. on July 31 that “more than a dozen alleged gang members” had ambushed the Marines. At the same time, KABC-TV 7's website (http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/news/073103_nw_marines_attacked.html) ran virtually the same story, now noting that the assailants were a “large group of knife-wielding gang members.” At one point, according to KABC, “the gang members left and returned in cars with reinforcements.”
The Capistrano Dispatch, a San Juan Capistrano weekly published by former Orange County Register scribe Jonathon Volzke, joined the cholo chorus. Volzke wrote on his website (www.thecapistranodispatch.com) that deputies were “searching for 12 to 15 men or teens, all Latino” and “were also investigating whether the attackers belonged to a gang.”
More careful with its coverage was San Diego station KFMB-TV 8. Its website (http://www.kfmb.com/topstory17252.html) noted that “a group of up to 15 people” jumped the Marines. The Los Angeles Times' Aug. 1 edition didn't elaborate on whether the attackers were gang members, although the caption running with the photo mentioned that “gang detectives are investigating but have no suspects.”
But two days after the event, some media outlets were still pushing the gangster angle. The Orange County Register claimed in its Aug. 2 Local section that “as many as 12 males, described as having shaved heads and possibly being gang members” were the culprits behind the San Juan scuffle. The Associated Press was even worse: an AP wire report published on the San Jose Mercury-News' site (http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/6428176.htm) led off with “Ten gang members attacked and knifed four off-duty Marines” in San Juan Capistrano. That story even ended with a quote from Orange County Sheriff's lieutenant Lloyd Downey's observation that “gang knife attacks on non-gang members are rare.”
Predictably, the story has spread to the public domain. The first post on the Register's message board regarding the incident, by “tikiman” on Aug. 1, noted that he had “just heard on the news that some off-duty Camp Pen. Marines. . .were attacked by a large group of Latino men in SJC. . .Makes you wonder if some of the Latin SJC residents are possibly Bin Laden terrorist?”
