Teen Hospitalized After Bat Attack by Men Yelling Slurs

ANAHEIM — Amber Jefferson, 15, lies in pain this weekend in a hospital room. Her face is battered beyond recognition--she cried when she looked in a mirror after four days. Her jaws are wired shut, the result of 10 hours of surgery to sew together the entire left side of her head.

She doesn’t remember everything. Just the men in the group yelling racial slurs, the two baseball bats, and being hit--first on her kneecaps to knock her down, then on her head.

The attack on Amber and four others began just after midnight Tuesday in the parking lot of a condominium complex on Cerritos Avenue. What happened is still under investigation by the Anaheim Police Department, which has not yet made any arrests.

The victims say the attack was racially motivated and that Amber Jefferson--daughter of a white mother and black father--did nothing to bring on the attack.

“A white girl is seen with a black girl and two black boys and someone has to pay a price for it,” said Katie Jefferson, Amber’s aunt. “This is the 1990s. When does it end?”

Though she is out of danger now, doctors say it could be two years before Amber has muscle control over the left side of her face, which is thickly scarred from the top of her head down to her neck.

The cheerleader from Santiago High School in Garden Grove spoke briefly in an interview from the hospital Saturday:

“They were yelling racial things, and they started hitting me and punching me. I don’t know why. I didn’t do anything to them.”

Amber’s family said that she and several other teen-agers--Michelle Schimmer, 16; Matt Stewart, 19; Rick Jones, 17, and his cousin, Lewis Jones, 19--had gone out for snacks and soft drinks. When they returned, Michelle walked up to a girl she knew in the condo complex, and they argued. The girl was soon joined by two white men armed with baseball bats, one a teen-ager who lived in the complex, the other in his late 20s, who was visiting from Australia.

Amber’s mother said someone in the other group had asked Michelle: “What are you doing with these (blacks)?”

Several victims said the first violence came when the Australian suddenly began swinging the bat. The father of the teen-ager with the other bat joined in and was also yelling racial slurs, they said.

At one point, witnesses said, one attacker retrieved a heavy shard of glass from a mirror.

“He threw it hard, right at Amber, who was already down,” Lewis Jones said.

Lewis Jones held Amber in his arms and kept the two sides of her head wound together until paramedics arrived. He said he did not expect her to survive because her wounds looked so bad.

All five victims were injured, although only Amber was hospitalized.

Though the police would not discuss the incident, the Jefferson family said one of the attackers fled town. The Australian, they said, has agreed to remain in the area until the investigation has been completed.

Mary Armstrong, with whom Amber was staying at the complex, said the Australian called her to tell her his side of what happened: He only began swinging because he was afraid of the black men.

Armstrong said she confronted the father of the teen-ager, and he claimed they did nothing wrong.

“We’re all really devastated by this,” Armstrong said. “I guess you never really know what people will do,” she said.