City residents urged to take stand against racial hatred
Fifteen-year-old Jim Fry thought he could handle anything until Sunday afternoon when two men he described as skinheads jumped him on a Spokane River beach and attacked his friends huddling in a van.Two men are in jail on suspicion of yelling racial slurs at the group of American Indians, hitting Fry, breaking a van window, slashing a car seat with a knife and then trying to run over Fry with a car as he ran.
What sticks with Fry the most, a Spokane native and Sioux Indian, is that a dozen people also on the beach didn’t offer any help.
“I love Spokane, but I don’t know what to think,” Fry said Tuesday. “All those people stood there and just watched.”
Support for the teen and his friends started showing Tuesday as members of the Washington Human Rights Commission, Spokane Human Rights Commission and the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane condemned the acts in a news conference.
“PJALS does not ask for vengeance or for unusually harsh punishment or a display of hatred for the accused,” said Rusty Nelson, leader of the peace and justice organization.
He did ask that people show their support for the Joseph family by attending the Riverfront Park powwow this weekend. He also asked that people show their support by wearing two paper clips on the weekend. The people of Norway wore paper clips to show they would not bow to Hitler’s demands or his military power, Nelson said.
“We can all find two paper clips,” Nelson said. Doing so will show “that we’re not alone, that we stand together with the powerful and the vulnerable, with people of all abilities and backgrounds, to defend our precious human rights.”
The teens are friends and family members of Bonnie Joseph, the lead organizer of the downtown Spokane powwow, which will continue as planned this weekend. Organizers moved some of their meetings to Joseph’s house so that she could be near her children.
Her 6-year-old, Destiny Joseph, remained quiet Tuesday in a house buzzing with guests, media calls, friends offering support and neighborhood teens passing through, who all refer to Joseph as some variation of “Mother.”
In front of the house was a van with a smashed window and a 10-inch gash in the car seat.
Her children were at first worried about the damage to her car, Joseph said. Joseph bought the car last week after going without a car for eight months. “I don’t care about the van,” Joseph said Tuesday. “I only care that you’re all safe.”
“Everyone’s begging me to get a cell phone,” Joseph said as she took calls from a man who wanted to know when he could set up a teepee in Riverfront Park.
Joseph said that her children were relieved when they learned the men could face jail time.
Daniel G. Wilson, 28, and convicted felon Andrew Charles Lovelace, 24, remained in custody Tuesday on charges of first-degree assault, felony harassment and second-degree malicious mischief.
Lovelace pleaded guilty in 1999 to second-degree assault in which he admitted striking a man over the head with a baseball bat. After three convictions as a juvenile, Lovelace spent seven months as an 18-year-old adult before he was arrested for his first felony.
Lovelace, who also goes by the names Andrew Grummel, Alex C. Lovelace, Grummel Lovelace, Andy Lovelace and Andrew C. Grummel, was ordered Monday to remain in jail on a $40,000 bond.
Wilson, of Missoula, was ordered held on a $50,000 bond by Court Commissioner Virginia Rockwood. Both declined requests for jailhouse interviews.
According to the police report, Mike Fry, 15, was by the Spokane River just before 4 p.m. Sunday when Lovelace and Wilson approached. They called Fry a racial slur often used against black people and a “dirty Indian,” court records state.
“We’re skinheads. This is our park. Get the (expletive) out of here,” one of the suspects yelled, according to two witnesses quoted in the police report.
As the teens backed away, two men allegedly started punching Fry.
Joslyn R. Buccelli, Joseph’s niece who drove the van to the beach, told police that both Lovelace and Wilson began chasing her, Maureena Twoteeth and other victims, including Bonnie Joseph’s 6-year-old, to their van.
“Lovelace produced a 6-inch bladed knife, told (Twoteeth) to get out of the car, and then slashed the front passenger seat,” the report stated.
Lovelace slashed the rear passenger tire and Wilson threw a rock through the rear passenger window of the 1993 Chevrolet Astro van, according to court records.
Thirteen-year-old Mike Ellenwood clutched his screaming 6-year-old cousin when the two men attacked the van. One man bashed a rock on the van window four times before busting through and flinging the rock inside, which bruised Ellenwood’s leg.
“I thought we were going to get killed,” Ellenwood said Tuesday afternoon at his aunt’s house in West Central Spokane.
In an interview Tuesday, Fry said his biggest concern was to protect the girls in the van. He said he yelled at the two suspects and drew them away from the van.
“The defendants said ‘We are going to kill you’ and then chased after (Fry). He said he feared for his life and ran,” according to the police report.
“I was going to fight the small guy, but I wasn’t going to fight two of them,” Fry said Tuesday.
Lovelace and Wilson then chased Fry with their car and attempted to run him over. He avoided serious injury by jumping over the wooden guardrail. He still has scratches on his back from rolling down the steep hill. Fry later identified both Lovelace and Wilson as the two suspects, the report states.
Police spokesman Dick Cottam said hate crimes are a high priority with the department. “We track them very carefully,” he said. “We don’t have very many of these.”
Many times hate-inspired incidents go unreported, Cottam said. He was unable late Tuesday to research exactly how many hate crimes had been reported this year.
This incident will likely be the talk of this year’s downtown powwow, said Dylan Lodge, a youth service specialist for the Native Project service organization. Everyone Lodge knows has been talking about the incident.
“This is scary. We know these kids,” Lodge said. “I’m sure one of the (powwow) emcees or an elder will say a prayer and remind the rest the community about this.”