Hate Turns Up The Heat
Attacks Mount in Denver
December, 6, 1997 San Jose Mercury News.
By Gwen Florio
Knight-Ridder News Service
DENVER THIS is one proud city. Populated largely by people who moved here from somewhere else, residents greet visitors with a laundry list of why Denver is so much better than the places they came from. Among the items invariably included in those recitations is the lack of crime and racial strife.That is why the recent rash of racist skinhead violence -- separate incidents in which: a police officer was shot dead by a white supremacist; a white supremacist killed a black man and shot a white woman who tried to help the slain man; and a black woman was roughed up Thanksgiving Day -- has hit Denver so hard.
"Denver has been a city that is very tolerant," said Butch Montoya, the city's public-safety director. "We are a city that respects diversity. . . .. These are isolated situations that could occur in any city at any time."
But some say Denver's lofty opinion of itself has deep roots in denial. "We have been too satisfied with our success," said the Rev. Acen Phillips of the Mount Gilead Baptist Church, a leader in the black community. "We keep applauding the progress we've made . . . when we should have been keeping a watchful eye on these negative groups like the skinheads who inhabit our city and our mountains."
Indeed, members of the Seattle-based Coalition for Human Dignity, which tracks hate groups, traveled to Colorado in September to warn of disturbing trends in the white-supremacist community. "There was an increase in militancy, and also in the willingness on the part of some of its members to go toward small terrorist activity," said Jonathan Mozzochi, the coalition's research director. "I think Denver is facing that."
Authorities say the incidents that began three weeks ago with the car chase and shootout that killed Denver police officer Bruce VanderJagt were unrelated. But they are concerned that VanderJagt's shooting may have inspired the other crimes. The officer's assailant, a skinhead named Matthaus Jaening, killed himself during the shootout. Later, a dead pig with VanderJagt's name crudely painted on its side was dumped at the Denver police substation where the officer had worked.
One week after the officer's death, another racist skinhead, Nathan Thill, was charged with shooting and killing West African immigrant Oumar Dia as he waited for a bus. In a television interview after his arrest, he admitted killing the man and said he had done so solely because Dia was black. Thill also shot Jeannie VanVelkinburgh, a nurse who tried to intervene. She was paralyzed. Six days later, in Grand Junction on Colorado's western border, a white teenager and two white transients beat a black man with a baseball bat and steel pipe as they shouted racial epithets.
AND ON Thanksgiving Day, a young black woman who asked a group of youths in a Denver convenience store if they were skinheads was beaten up in response, police said.
The combination of incidents gave the area unwanted attention at a time when its most famous hate crime, the 1984 shooting death of Jewish radio personality Alan Berg by members of a white-supremacist group known as the Order, had nearly been forgotten.
City officials scrambled to recover, staging an anti-hate rally attended by nearly 1,000 people. "Colorado is not the hate state," said Bill Mosher of the Downtown Denver Partnership, a coalition of city businesses, "and Denver is not the headquarters of the Aryan Nation. That's headline stuff."
Anne Sulton, legal counsel for the Denver NAACP, said it's hard to get people to talk about race in Denver, where African-Americans make up about 12 percent of the population. (The city is about 22 percent Latino, 2 percent Asian.) "People will throw stones at you for alleging that racism even exists," she said. "But we want people to realize that if you just focus on racially motivated hate crimes by skinheads, you'll miss the whole picture. We've got skinheads, we've got Posse Comitatus, we've got the Aryan Brotherhood." "There are a whole lot of folks out here promoting racism, and we've got to be vigilant."
Colorado, like many Western states, has its share of hate groups. It has 17 known skinhead groups, said Joy Roy of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Klanwatch organization, which tracks such groups. And there are other white-supremacy and anti-government groups.
IN MAY, Aurora police arrested three alleged "militia" members after a cache of machine guns and explosives was found in a house. In January, a white separatist was stabbed to death in the federal high-security prison near Florence. Last year, a state senator's daughter was jailed after proclaiming herself a sovereign citizen and rejecting local jurisdiction over a traffic citation -- a tactic common among members of anti-government groups such as the Freemen.
"There is a tendency to dismiss a lot of this stuff as one more incident in a long tradition of rugged Western individualism; to accept it as the political culture of our Western states," said Mozzochi. "But we would argue that in many cases, this rugged Western individualism is overtly racist." The NAACP planned a news conference to suggest ways the city can combat racism, and Denver's ministerial alliance is meeting this week to talk strategy. "OK, we've had the rally, and we've had people running around with anti-hate buttons, and driving with their lights on. . . . We've done the public symbolism thing," Sulton said. "Now let's take it to the next step."
Montoya said police already are cracking down on local
skinheads, arresting those with outstanding warrants and
aggressively patrolling their hangouts. When police do
that, skinhead groups usually move to other cities, said Roy.
That can't happen soon enough for Phillips. What is most
frightening to members of his congregation, he said, is the
random nature of the attack on Dia, and the fact that Jaening
said in his television interview that he wished only that he'd
killed a more prominent person. "Now," Phillips said,
"people who tend to be very vocal, very outspoken -- the
people who give us great leadership -- could tend to back up and
say, `Wait a minute. Am I putting my life literally on the line?'
"If that happens, we will lose our leadership. Everything
we've worked for will be pulled apart."
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