Police Still Probing ‘Hate Crime’/Shooting Link
Don Kazak, Palo Alto Online, February 24, 2009
Mountain View police have arrested four East Palo Alto people–three Pacific Islanders and a Latino–and charged them with a hate crime for allegedly insulting and beating four persons from India outside a Mountain View bar at 1:30 a.m. Saturday.
But police are still puzzling over a possible connection to the shooting of an East Palo Alto man–who turned out to be a cousin of two of the men arrested for the hate crime.
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As far as the Mountain View police know, the shooting and the alleged hate crime are completely unrelated.
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The four Hindi-speaking people, three men and a woman, had left a Mountain View bar at 1:30 a.m. to walk to their car, Wylie said, when they were confronted by two women who made racial comments about their native language and ethnicity. The two women confronted the Hindi-speaking woman and began “punching and slapping her,” Wylie said.
When the victim’s husband came to her aid, “four to six male suspects appeared and dragged the man away from his wife and began punching and kicking him,” Wylie said.
The two other male victims also tried to intervene and were punched, Wylie said. All the alleged attackers then fled in two cars, she said.
