Steamboat Springs police are investigating a barroom brawl that may have been motivated by racial slurs aimed at an African-American man who says he was attacked.
Alfred LaVaughn Turner, 41, said he was talking with two white women at the bar at Sunpie’s Bistro on Friday evening when two white men approached him and said “leave our white women alone.”
Turner, who said he was shocked by the comment, responded: “Who’s going to make me?”
“Us Nazis,” was the reply by the unidentified suspect, who then smashed a beer bottle over Turner’s head and stabbed him in the calf after they wrestled to the floor.
Capt. Joel Rae of the Steamboat Springs Police Department said two suspects have been identified and contacted on suspicion of assault and ethnic intimidation, but no arrests have been made.
“Ethnic intimidation is a felony, and it’s a serious crime and one that’s not tolerated by society or us,” Rae said. “We’re looking at it seriously, and that’s why we’re not going to do a hasty investigation.”
Turner suffered a concussion and needed about 20 stitches to sew up the wound in his leg.
He described the assailant as 5-foot-6, but he said he was unable to identify him based on the black-and-white photographs police showed him.
Officials in the overwhelmingly white community have periodically struggled with racial incidents: In 2004, members of the high-school football team were accused of making racist comments during a game with a predominantly Latino team, and a decade earlier someone spray-painted slurs on a highway bridge dedicated to soul singer James Brown.
Turner, who is between jobs after working in the oil fields of western Colorado, said he has had no problems in town since he arrived a month and a half ago but now fears for his life.
“It is a small town, and everybody kind of knows everybody so even when I’m at the grocery store, I do feel that people are watching me. Or when I’m driving my car. And I have no way of protecting myself,” he said.
His relatives in Florida want him to leave town, he said, but he feels strongly about not running away.
“I didn’t want to show him any fear. Because if I showed him fear, the same thing probably would happen again,” Turner said.
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
