LA MESA, California — The streets of La Mesa were bustling Sunday with disaster tourists checking out the ruins, taking pictures and remarking on the devastation. On Saturday night, a mob of rioters -joining what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration protesting police brutality- threw rocks and bottles at the La Mesa Police Department Headquarters. Looted bottles of liquor became incendiary bombs, turning the Chase Bank and Union Bank on Spring Street into heaps of charred concrete, twisted metal and still smoldering pieces of lumber. Construction crews had already begun clearing the debris, but it’s a big job that has only just begun.
Overhearing a conversation, I learned that a handful of La Mesa residents took it upon themselves to protect their community from the rioters. I spoke to one of them, whose initials are CB.
CB: …So last night, when it started, we all went home and regrouped. Maybe twenty, thirty minutes after it all started, we slowly started to gather at each one of our locations and tried to protect it.
EGT: Protect it how? Were you armed?
CB: Absolutely. We had guns, knives, bats, everything. What I noticed with this group was that the earlier group wasn’t looking for fights. So, it was nice. If you were physically standing in front of your building, they wouldn’t take action. They would show up and turn around. The bummer is that we didn’t have enough physical people in the beginning to stand in front of every location. That’s why you see the sporadic hits down the street. But when they burned down the architecture building, the tide changed and I got worried. There was a mood where it almost got to violence might happen. That’s when two shots happened and there’s two ammo bullets in the side of Farm Table. We stayed out until about 3:30 listening to police scanners. We heard about breaking and entering. About ten to fifteen of us ran down there armed and chased them out of there. We walked around until about 3:45 walking the neighborhood, shining lights on cars and chased them out of the neighborhood.
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I later heard CB tell someone else that when the police came in to use the bathroom at Curbside Café their uniforms were covered in shots from paintball guns. He admired the restraint it took for them to be shot with paint balls [which doesn’t break the skin, but does hurt] and not use their sidearms in response. The LMPD used rubber bullets and tear gas. But remarkably, no one was shot and killed.
There was other talk on the street about the rioters stealing from liquor stores, getting drunk and using the rest as accelerant for the fires. Vons was looted for some of their alcohol and one of their delivery trucks was burned.
I spoke to a dispatcher who said that there was not any official coordination between the LMPD and this group of vigilantes. … But he also doubted that the police would be going after them any time soon.
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Eric George Tauber is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted via eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com
In the last paragraph of your article you chose to use, “this group of vigilantes” which so does not describe the people who started the Facebook group after the horrendous attack on my town. It’s a decidedly cheap potshot remark on your part.
How are people that engage in vigilante justice not vigilantes? If the slipper fits.