It is midnight on November 13, 1988 in Portland, Oregon. Three
Ethiopian males are quietly conversing in a brown station wagon
when one male, Mulugeta Seraw, says goodnight and heads for his
apartment. Three members of the East Side White Pride (ESWP) jump
out of a car and begin to beat twenty-seven year old Seraw to
death with steal bats. In 1990, chief counsel Morris
Dees for the plaintiff brings a civil suit to court, Judge
Ancer L. Haggerty presiding, attempting to punish Tom and John
Metzger, founders of White Aryan Resistance (WAR) and the Aryan
Youth Movement, for inciting young Caucasian males towards violence
against non-whites.
The
skinhead movement
is reminiscent of the Aryan
supremacist movement in the 1940s with the rise of Nazism. In
fact, the skinhead race advocates the "master race" in such ways
that can be compared to the genocide of the Jewish community during
the Holocaust. Tom Metzger and his son John are the Hitlers of
the 1990s who create a new type of genocide: the Neo-Nazi method
of executing non-whites and "racial traitors". Dave Mazzella was
appointed Vice-President of the Aryan Youth Movement, a subsidiary
of WAR, by Tom and John Metzger and was a principle role in the
education of violence towards non-whites to skinheads in Oregon.
On October 6, 1988, "Ken Death" Mieske, one member of the ESWP
who killed Seraw, received a letter from John Metzger announcing
the arrival of Dave Mazzella, which he proudly displayed in a
meeting to his fellow ESWP members. On the first day of Mazzella's
arrival in Oregon in October 1988, accompanied with a group of
skinheads, he went
to a bar and almost immediately began a racial beating against
an innocent black male. On leaving the bar, the group walked through
Lowell Hertz Park where they encountered a group of white males
and a certain Ramiro Cruz who they considered to be "not" white.
Ramiro Cruz was also a victim of a racial beating. Dave Mazzella
attended his first ESWP meeting on November 12, 1988 to instruct
ESWP members on the proper procedures of initiating a fight and
carrying out physical abuse, which he himself had learned in Tom
Metzger's house prior to his arrival in Portland.
His
lessons included what is known as "bashing, a sport in which "hunting
parties" of White youth seek out non-White individuals and break
their bones…" The following evening, Mulugeta Seraw was murdered.
