Utah Police Deny Boy’s Killing Was Hate Crime

When Bernardo Repreza moved from North Hollywood three months ago to live with his father in Salt Lake City, his family thought he would be safe from street gangs.

They did not imagine they would be burying the 15-year-old in the Hollywood Hills today, two weeks after he was beaten and stabbed to death in a brawl with 30 Straight Edge skinheads--a white middle-class gang that espouses violence as well as vegetarianism, abstinence from drugs, alcohol and premarital sex. Nor could they have predicted the controversy sparked by Bernardo’s death, as city officials and Salt Lake City activists debate whether the slaying was motivated by gang rivalry or racial hatred.

Salt Lake City police have arrested two murder suspects--both high school seniors, one a juvenile. But police have denied allegations that the slaying was racially motivated and have cast it as a gang fight.

“What’s the primary motive?” said a Salt Lake City police source who declined to be identified. “These kids were just upset with each other. This wasn’t a group looking for victims of their racism.”

That view angers many community activists, who say police are more interested in preserving Salt Lake City’s image than determining the truth about a potential hate crime.

“The Olympics are coming here in 2002,” said Mike Martinez, a local lawyer and Latino activist. “No one wants the perception that in Salt Lake, people can be killed just because of the color of their skin.”

As the battle rages on in Utah, family members and friends in Los Angeles grieved over their loss and spoke fondly of the boy who aspired to become a Marine and who touched all who knew him. Gordon Clayton, Bernardo’s stepfather, said the family had to hold two funerals--the first in Utah on Wednesday and the second today--to accommodate all of the boy’s friends. More than 300 people attended the service at a Mormon church in Salt Lake City.

Friends at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, where Bernardo was a student until he moved, described him as a gregarious “ladies’ man.”

“He said he wanted to be a model, and he had the looks,” said Brenda Najeia, 15, who met Bernardo in March during a world history class. Brenda said Bernardo was always dapper and always above the fray, avoiding the gangster lifestyle that swirled around him.

“You should have seen his funeral,” said Cecily Patton, who taught Bernardo in the sixth grade when he previously lived in Utah. “There were many, many brokenhearted girls of every race crying, and boys as well. He was a gorgeous kid to look at, and he had a twinkle in his eye that was visible from a mile away.”

But police detectives said that Bernardo’s many friends may have put him in harm’s way on Halloween night, at first calling him a gangster wanna-be.

“Unfortunately, he associated with gang members,” said Lt. Phil Kirk of the Salt Lake City Police Department. “He was hanging around the wrong people at the wrong time and got caught in the mix of it.”

The people who knew Bernardo said he never wanted to belong to a gang but that he had friends of every stripe--including gangsters.

On Halloween night Bernardo and Jaynell Latay Cooper, 19, cruised along Salt Lake City’s main thoroughfare with about 10 friends in two cars. Cooper stopped at a traffic light next to a large group of Straight Edgers standing on a street corner. Police said Cooper, who is African American, initiated the fight by yelling at the Straight Edgers. A youth in one of the cars displayed a handgun, police said.

But Bernardo’s older brother, Carlos, who was there that night, tells a different story: “They started spitting on the car and yelling” racial slurs.

No one disputes what came next: Both cars emptied and the two groups engaged in a deadly battle, with Samoans, blacks and Latinos on one side and white Straight Edgers armed with bats, chains, knives and beer bottles on the other. Police found no firearms.

Police were holding Colin C. Reesor, 17, and Andrew D. Moench, 18, at the Salt Lake County Jail in lieu of $500,000 bail. Moench is accused of clubbing Bernardo with a baseball bat, Reesor with stabbing him. Both have been charged with murder, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison in Utah. Reesor will be tried as an adult.

Officials with the Salt Lake City district attorney’s office said it is unlikely they will press hate-crime charges since the pair are already being held on felony murder charges. Under Utah’s state laws a hate crime turns misdemeanors into felony offenses, but such charges are moot when the crime is already a felony, prosecutors said.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office, which also has jurisdiction over potential hate crimes, said they were watching the case closely but did not indicate whether prosecutors would proceed with federal charges.

That didn’t sit well with Gordon Clayton, who was busy Friday making arrangements for his stepson’s burial at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park today.

“I think the police are downplaying it so people will believe their city doesn’t have a problem,” he said.