Reward Offered for Conviction in Cross Burning

A reward of up to $3,000 was offered Thursday to help authorities find and convict whoever burned a 6-foot wooden cross outside the home of a Jewish family in Huntington Beach.

“When one finds a cross burning in 1998 in an Orange County community, it is something to take very seriously,” said Joyce Greenspan, director of the Anti-Defamation League, which offered the reward. “Cross burnings are incredibly difficult for victims to deal with.”

Investigators said it was not the first time the family has been targeted. The family, who requested anonymity, told police that they once found a swastika carved into their front lawn but did not report it.

Huntington Beach Police Lt. Luis Ochoa said the cross burning on Tuesday night is “particularly disturbing not only because of the danger and that it could have set the house on fire but [because of] the implications that it was directed at people just because of who they are.”

The last such incident in Orange County occurred in 1991 when a Jewish man found a burned cross on his front lawn in Garden Grove. A similar 1988 case, aimed at an African American family in Westminster, prompted the state to stiffen penalties against anyone who leaves a burning cross on a lawn or desecrates any religious symbol as “an act of racial, ethnic or religious terrorism.”

Such a crime is considered a felony and can result in up to three years in prison, Ochoa said.

Rusty Kennedy, director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, said that hate crimes in Orange County have decreased 21% since 1991. Of the 145 such crimes reported in 1997, one-fifth were targeted at Jews.

“Cross burnings really harken back to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s,” Kennedy said. “It is a sick ideology represented by white supremacists who feel their mission from God is to purify the human race.”

Huntington Beach Mayor Shirley S. Dettloff also decried the incident.

“I am shocked that these things still happen to us,” Dettloff said. “We, as a city, want to do everything possible to let the family know they have a community standing behind them.”