Charges pending as FBI investigates racist Lynnwood beating
LYNNWOOD — Six months after an African-American DJ was stomped at a bar north of Lynnwood, eight suspects are still awaiting charges.
It’s not clear if federal authorities will take the case, or if the charging decision will be made by the office of Snohomish County Prosecutor Adam Cornell.
“The matter is under review, and my office and local law enforcement have been in contact with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Cornell said this week.
It’s being investigated as a hate crime by the FBI and the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.
Early on the morning of Dec. 8, 2018, a large group of men — encouraged in part by two women, according to one witness account — tried to hijack a DJ’s gear at the Rec Room Bar & Grill on Highway 99. The DJ resisted, and they shouted the N-word at him and beat him, court papers say. He suffered a swollen eye, and an owner of the bar reported he’d been struck with what felt like brass knuckles. Sheriff’s deputies wrote that they arrested the suspects as they fled the scene in two vehicles.
All eight suspects carried at least one emblem of white nationalism: a swastika ring; an Imperial cross; and patches and business cards of the hate group Crew 38, search warrants revealed.
Most had come from out of state — Oregon, Illinois, North Carolina — in what detectives suspect was a kind of pilgrimage to Whidbey Island, where terrorist Robert Jay Mathews, of The Order, died in a shootout with the FBI on Dec. 8, 1984.
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