Bloody Saturday

On April 6, what was supposed to be his last day visiting Atlanta, Idris Golden went CD shopping in Little Five Points with his brother, Che. It was spring break for Idris, a Baltimore schoolteacher, and he spent it with his family. The brothers stopped off at Criminal Records, then Wax 'n Facts.

Sitting on a curb outside were some panhandlers; all day, they had been spouting racial slurs at black passersby.

"They were saying something like, 'Niggers, we need money,'" Che says. Then they thrusted their palms at the Goldens mockingly. Idris tried to wave them off. "One of them kept coming at us," Che says, "saying, 'Nigger! Nigger!' and dancing around us."

From across the street, Nancy Grisby saw what followed. "It's been haunting me."

Angela Pisciotta, a 19-year-old Californian, started kicking and punching Che, according to Grisby and other witnesses.

"The white girl looked me in my face and said, 'You're a nigger. If you ain't white then you ain't right,'" says Brandi Jordan, who was standing a few feet away.

Ulysses Andrade, Pisciotta's friend, then knocked Che to the ground, stomped his neck and kicked him in the face, witnesses say. Che, slumped against the wall of the Clothing Warehouse with his hearing aids knocked out of his ears and blood trickling from his mouth, passed in and out of consciousness.

"At some point when I woke up, all three of them had my brother in a headlock, punching his head and pulling on his dreads," Che says.

Idris lay a few yards off, near a hydrant at the curb of Moreland Avenue. Some of his dreadlocks, ripped from his scalp, lay scattered and bloody. The third assailant, whom police identify as Christopher Botts, stood over him.

"The guy was literally jumping up into the air and coming down on his neck, kicking his face into the fire hydrant and stomping his face on the concrete," Jordan says. "[Idris] is coughing up blood and finally he just stops moving, stops defending himself and just lays there."

The three alleged attackers, all from California, are charged with aggravated battery and reckless conduct in the beatings of the Goldens. They are being held in the Fulton County jail without bond. Atlanta police are calling the attack a hate crime and have appointed a special investigations unit to the case.

"I don't think this is going to be a typical incident at all," says police spokesman Lt. John Quigley. "Obviously, there are people with their biases or prejudices, but they don't normally go about showing them in this fashion. It's horrendous."

Little Five Points earned its place on the map of Atlanta's hip neighborhoods for its anyone goes attitude. Punk rockers, hardcore freaks, rockabillies, indy geeks, deadheads, dreadlock rastas and arthouse snobs have coexisted for years at the juncture of Euclid and Moreland avenues.

What happened two Saturdays ago, however, is more reflective of the Little Five Points of the 1980s, when skinheads regularly gathered there. Faye Allen, producing director at 7 Stages, recalls how Klansmen even made an appearance in 1985, protesting the theater's unfavorable staging of KKK-based characters.

But the radicalism that once flourished in Little Five had withered. In the past two decades, Little Five has grown more commercial and more upscale — better described as a tourist stop than a danger zone.

"It just surprises me," Allen says of the attack. "I haven't seen that kind of energy around here in a long time."

Yet even before the Goldens were attacked, flyers posted along Euclid Avenue warned: "Recently, neo-Nazis have begun to verbally and physically harass people in Little 5 Points. ... These self-proclaimed Nazis want to turn Little 5 Points into a community where racist harassment, fear and intimidation are accepted and where all progressive people are afraid to come. We can't let them succeed." The flyers include an e-mail address, but inquiries sent to the address went unanswered.

Police are releasing little information about the attackers, such as whether they're neo-Nazis or members of local white supremacist groups such as The National Alliance. The police report, however, states that even after they were arrested, Pisciotta, Andrade and Botts couldn't stop themselves from making derogatory remarks about blacks.

"Mr. Botts said something about society being the way it is because of 'niggers,'" Officer M. Geurin wrote in the report. "All I could think was these guys are filled with a lot of hate."

Last year, Atlanta police investigated 28 hate crimes, but none in Little Five Points. The three alleged assailants in the Little Five Points attack, however, may become test subjects for Georgia's hate crime law, which has been on the books for two years but rarely has been invoked.

In the state's first and apparent only hate crime sentence, a Sumter County judge last summer sent Steven Van Deventer to jail for a month for punching newspaper reporter Sissy Bowen, who's a lesbian. Van Deventer had pleaded guilty to simple battery, a misdemeanor that typically wouldn't warrant jail time.

Under the law, a felony hate crime can add five years to a criminal's sentence; moreover, 90 percent of the sentence must be served.

Vincent Fort, the state senator behind the hate crime legislation, says the law isn't intended to be used in trials as much as it is in plea-bargaining: "We realize that when a person commits a crime and they're facing the enhanced penalty, they'll want to plea out."

On Monday, after several inquires from Creative Loafing, Fort called a press conference on the Golden beatings outside the Fulton County Courthouse. Erik Friedly, spokesman for Fulton County district attorney Paul Howard, says the Goldens' alleged attackers may be indicted as soon as April 16.

Last week, five days after the beating, Che was sitting in the lobby of Grady Memorial Hospital, where his brother was recovering upstairs. A blood vessel in his eye was popped. Scrapes covered his forehead. The 29-year-old has worn hearing aids in both ears since he was 5, but was having trouble hearing that afternoon; he was wearing only one (the other had been destroyed).

Che stayed in the hospital for three days, but Idris had to stay 72 hours in intensive care alone. (He was released from ICU Friday.) And even once he was stabilized, 25-year-old Idris still couldn't form complete sentences. Nor could he remember the attack.

Che can. "They could have killed us right there," he says.

Che has been doing post-graduate work at Georgia State and had started a new job at IBM. But he's had to put both on hold. Nor was he able to make his attackers' April 8 court date. But his mother did. The judge denied bond and set the arraignment for April 30.

"I would not say it was awful to look at them," Jewel Golden says of Pisciotta, Andrade and Botts. "It's awful to see what they have done to my children."

mara.shalhoup@creativeloafing.com??