Racists come in all sizes, colors and creeds. This, I know. Yet of all the racially tinged incidents I figured I might one day write about, this one wasn’t it.
It occurred the evening of Aug. 8 at a packed music festival at Civic Center. As he was headed out, Mark Gruber was stopped by a man. He told his friends he would catch up.
As he stood chatting, another man — an acquaintance of the man he was chatting with — said something vile.
“What’s going on?” Gruber asked the new man. “Why are you being so racist?”
The new man replied that Gruber had better shut up or he would be beaten up. “What are you talking about?” Gruber said, puzzled.
The next thing Gruber knew, he had been sucker punched, his lip split and his nose fractured. Police officers and witnesses subdued the attacker, who was charged with a bias-related felony.
Mark Gruber is white. He is a Denver rabbi, a Hebrew teacher and as gentle a soul as you will meet.
Allen Trent Watkins is black. “Let’s get out of here before I start beating up white guys,” is what he told the man chatting with Gruber, which led to it all.
Being victimized simply because of what you look like is a vile crime. In my book, the perpetrators are just below killers, rapists and child-sex offenders.
To this day, Gruber says he does not know what set the man off. But the attack has changed him, he says, and that is more than a bit of a shame.
He is a man who knows relatively little about hate and bias.
He said he remembers house sitting one evening in a mostly all-black neighborhood in Denver.
It was late. He heard the banging on his front door. A black man was being chased by his wife, who was wielding a handgun.
No one else in the neighborhood would answer their door. He let the man in. He talked the woman into handing him the gun. A day later, she thanked him for saving herself and her marriage.
His beating, though, has changed him.
“It changed me in terms of being more cautious now,” he said. “It hasn’t affected my level of loving others. I am just more discerning now.”
I asked him what that meant. He, by his own description, is a “teaching and loving wandering Jew.”
“I ask myself now who will benefit more from the time I spend, versus those who will scoff at it,” he says.
“I don’t look at life with a jaundiced eye, no. I am just paying more attention. It’s better. I am learning to get back on the bike.”
I was going to press him harder, but I felt terrible for him. I felt terrible for the loss of innocence he clearly endured, although I know he would argue with me for 30 years that he had not.
He is more upset that Watkins’ lawyer has negotiated with the district attorney to plead guilty to a misdemeanor bias-related crime. Apparently, he said, the man suffers from schizophrenia, which led to the attack.
All Gruber wants, he said, is to address the man at his sentencing next month.
“I plan to say something, exactly what I don’t know,” he said.
“Jail, I know, will only make him worse. But I want him to hear me, get him to see there was no point to what he was doing.
“I want him,” Mark Gruber said, “to ruminate on what he did, how things could have been so different.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
