Residents Plead for Effort to ‘Reclaim’ San Clemente From Violence

SAN CLEMENTE —  An emotional crowd, including some residents in tears, packed City Hall Tuesday night and called for an end to the violence and gang activity in the seaside city.

“We need to do whatever it takes to reclaim San Clemente,” said Nancy Sutherland, an eight-year San Clemente resident and president of the high school booster club. “We need to give a level, clear message to the criminal element--but not a racial element--that we will not tolerate this. We do have a problem with gangs here.”

Most of the speakers, including high school students, parents and grandparents who marched one by one to the podium, called for the citizens to join together to ease the tension that has gripped the city since an Oct. 15 attack on 17-year-old Steve Woods that left him on life-support.

“If we work together we will be unstoppable,” said Jesse Fisher, 17, a San Clemente High School senior who organized a student march to City Hall on Tuesday. “We need to open our eyes as a community--the Mexicans, the blacks and the whites.”

Fisher drew a loud cheer from the audience when he said the shocking attack that left Woods with severe brain damage and the resulting student march were not racially motivated. Other speakers at City Hall were jeered when they characterized the city’s problems as racial.

“It was not a racial thing. People who think that got the wrong impression,” Fisher said.

The comments came a day after about 75 San Clemente High School students walked off the campus and marched three miles to City Hall to protest rising violence in the city and support their injured classmate, Woods.

Woods, 17, a popular senior, was critically injured Oct. 15 and remains in a deep coma in a local hospital. He and a group of friends were leaving Calafia Beach County Park, police said, when the four carloads of teen-agers were pelted with rocks and bottles by another group of young men and teens. Police reports indicated the attack may have been sparked by an altercation at a San Clemente gas station a day earlier.

During the melee, Woods was speared by the metal rod of a paint roller, which lodged in his head above his right ear. Though surgeons removed the rod Woods remains on life support at the Children’s Hospital wing of the hospital. He is scheduled to be transferred to Kaiser Permanente Anaheim Medical Center in Anaheim Hills, where his family has insurance coverage. His condition has remained virtually unchanged since he was admitted to the hospital, said Dr. Thomas E. Shaver, a trauma surgeon.

“He will occasionally take a breath, but he cannot maintain himself without a respirator,” Shaver said.

Two adults and four juveniles were arrested the day after the attack and have each been charged with six felony counts of assault and one felony count of throwing an object at a moving vehicle. The four juveniles pleaded not guilty to all counts Tuesday and the two adults are scheduled to be arraigned Nov. 2 in Laguna Niguel Municipal Court.

If the adults are convicted of the charges, they could serve a maximum of eight years in prison. The teen-agers, ages 16 and 17, face detainment in a youth facility until the age of 25.

Prosecutors are pursuing efforts to have the juveniles tried as adults, in which case they could also serve a maximum of eight years in prison. There is a further possibility that the charges in each case could be upgraded if Woods dies from his injury, a prosecutor said.