cross posted at Post Scipts
by Tina Grazier

On April 16, a Monday, passengers aboard the last Amtrak train of the day back from the Bay Area wondered why the engine ground to a stop as it approached the I Street bridge over the Sacramento River. They didn-t know that five people stood on the tracks, gang members among them, throwing rocks at the engineer, who stopped the train. The attackers dragged him out, demanded his wallet and cell phone, then beat him senseless with a bottle and a fire extinguisher. They also attacked the train’s conductor. The engineer, with head and internal injuries, was taken to hospital. The train finally crossed the river to the Sacramento station under the control of a student conductor.

“This is lawless barbarism,” West Sacramento mayor Christopher Cabaldon told the Bee’s Tony Bizjak, but the attackers remained unidentified. ** An April 18 Associated Press story came headlined “Mob forces train to stop, assaults engineer in West Sacrament” but mentioned only a “group of people” on the tracks. That could have meant anybody, but on Thursday emerged the involvement of the Broderick Boys a criminal street gang under a court injunction by Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, who calls the gang “domestic terrorists.”

On April 24, an appeal court tossed Reisig’s injunction, under which violent crime had decreased eight percent in the safety zone. The next day, the Bee ran a prominently featured piece of nearly 1,000 words by veteran reporters Bill Lindelof and Stephen Managnini. It turned out to be a forum for Joe Castro, 76, who described himself as proud to be a Broderick Boy, even though, he said, “I’ve never been around them when they caused any trouble.” Castro’s wife Mary said the injunction was “the worst thing that could have happened here,” stigmatizing a Latino community. Activists of La Raza Network said likewise. Neither Castro mentioned the train attack.

Bee columnist Marcos Breton also failed to mention the train attack at all in his April 29 column, “West Sac’s Gang Law was Racially Unfair.” He conceded that crime was down in the areas covered by the injunction but charged that the measure was a kind of racial profiling of “brown people.” The piece included no opinion on the fairness of the injunction from the engineer whose head the Broderick Boys had bashed in, nor from the conductor who had been beaten. The “alternative” Sacramento News & Review likewise avoided any mention of the train attack in its piece on the gang injunction against the Broderick Boys.

All told, a successful injunction against a violent gang garnered more wrath than a savage attack which Eugene Skoropowski, executive director of the Capitol Corridor train service, told the Bee was “the most horrific incident” he had seen in 40 years on the railroad.

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