San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Junior market steer event scaled back
Many of the traditions remained the same.
On the final Saturday of the annual San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo, the crowd at Freeman Coliseum’s auction barn wore neatly pressed western wear and cowboy hats. There was the moment of prayer, and everyone placed hands and hats over hearts during the national anthem.
The opening of a door to the staging area ushered in the earthy smell of hay and livestock as the parade of award-winning animals began.
But this year’s junior market auction was by invitation only for 100 of the show’s top buyers, the result of safety precautions designed to protect against the coronavirus. Everyone had their temperature taken before entering the barn and almost everyone was wearing a mask.
Saige Martin, 18, from Oldham County 4-H in far North Texas, started off the auction with Jimmy Buffett, her 2021 Grand Champion junior market steer.
She kept the animal close to her on the sawdust-covered stage as auctioneer C. Jason Spence called for bids with rapid-fire delivery. W.M. “Rusty” Rush, CEO and president of Rush Enterprises, scored the winning bid of $63,939 in memory of his late father, Marvin Rush, a rodeo hall of fame inductee and longtime supporter of the stock show and rodeo scholarship program.
It wasn’t a record, but the hefty amount meant a great deal to Martin.
“I still can’t process it,” she said in the staging area after the announcement. “You work at it all year around and to finally have it pay off is an incredible feeling. I had a goal to win this
“I still can’t process it. You work at it all year around and to finally have it pay off is an incredible feeling. I had a goal to win this show, and it’s finally happened.”
Saige Martin, 18, from Oldham County 4-H
show and it’s finally happened.”
Martin, a senior at Vega High School, also received a $10,000 scholarship.
Next up was the Reserve Champion junior market steer, Yeti, shown by Braxton Buckner, 18, of New Home in northwest Texas.
The high school senior from New Home FFA said he normally raises pigs. Showing the white shorthorn steer was his first time exhibiting cattle.
“It’s kind of like the lottery,” Buckner said, as steers mooed in nearby pens. “I never expected to do this good at the San Antonio livestock show.”
The winning bid of $39,000 for Yeti came from a group of 14 buyers.
The auctions were just two of 216 livestock sales which go to fund educational programs and scholarships.
Last year, several buyers bid $110,000 for grand champion Foo, a MaineAnjou; a group of 11 buyers bid $75,000 for reserve champion Coconut.
Rodeo spokeswoman Lauren Sides said this was the first time the auction was livestreamed. Donors can continue to do add-on donations online for the young exhibitors until Friday.
More than 40 tables separated six feet apart lined the space normally filled with bleachers, which would have been packed with cheering participants. Saturday, it was a lot quieter. Each table had two chairs and a bottle of hand sanitizer.
Youth had fewer chances to showcase their work this year after the virus forced the cancellation of the shows in Austin, Fort Worth and Houston.
The San Antonio Livestock Exposition board decided to go ahead despite the pandemic. The event was scaled down considerably and new technology was added to protect against the virus.
Auction Committee Chairman Neal Brodbeck thanked the SALE leadership for making the event possible.
“They said we’re going to have this damn livestock auction, we’re going to have a rodeo,” he said. “And we did.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Weary of being cooped inside during the pandemic, Vicha Ratanapakdee was impatient for his regular morning walk. He washed his face, put on a baseball cap and face mask and told his wife he would have the coffee she had prepared for him when he returned. Then, on a brisk and misty Northern California winter morning last month, he stepped outside.
About an hour later, Vicha, an 84-year-old retired auditor from Thailand, was violently slammed to the ground by a man who charged into him at full speed. It was the type of forceful body blow that might have knocked unconscious a young football player in full protective pads. For Vicha, who stood 5 feet, 6 inches and weighed 113 pounds, the attack was fatal. He died of a brain hemorrhage in a San Francisco hospital two days later.
Captured on a neighbor’s security camera, the video of the attack was watched with horror around the world. Among Asian Americans, many of whom have endured racist taunts, rants and worse during the coronavirus pandemic, the killing of a defenseless older man became a rallying cry.
In the past year, researchers and activist groups have tallied thousands of racist incidents against Asian Americans, a surge in hate that they link to former President Donald Trump repeatedly referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.” Vicha’s family described his killing as racially motivated, and it spurred a campaign to raise awareness by many prominent Asian Americans, who used the online hashtags #JusticeForVicha and #StopAsianHate.
“The killing of Vicha was so plain as day,” said Will Lex Ham, a
New York-based actor who, after watching the video, flew from New York to San Francisco to help lead protests and safety patrols in Asian neighborhoods. “There was no longer any way to ignore the violence that was happening to people who look like us.”
Antoine Watson, a 19-year-old resident of neighboring Daly City, was arrested two days after the attack and charged with murder and elder abuse. He has pleaded not guilty, but his lawyer admits that his client had an “outburst of rage.”
Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco district attorney, said Vicha’s death was heinous. But he said there is no evidence to suggest it was motivated by racial animus.
Still, at a time when demands for racial justice have rocked a demographically evolving nation, the killing of Vicha was notable for the galvanizing anger it brought to a diverse group that encompasses people of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, South Asian and Southeast Asian heritage. The killing of a Thai man in America has given voice to a united community under the umbrella of an Asian American identity.
His killing came at a time when other disturbing images and reports were emerging from across the San Francisco Bay. Three days later an attacker shoved a 91-yearold man in Oakland’s Chinatown to the ground, another video that rocketed around the internet.
That older victim has been wrongly described in many news accounts as Asian. Court documents give the victim’s name as Gilbert Diaz, and Carl Chan, a community leader and president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, said the victim was Latino. But Chan said he has tallied more than two dozen assaults against Asian American victims in Chinatown, including two other people shoved by the assailant who knocked down Diaz.
Crime data from the district attorney offices in San Francisco County and Alameda County, which includes Oakland, show that people of Asian descent were less likely last year to be victims of crimes than other ethnic groups. In San Francisco, where 36 percent of the population is of Asian descent, 16 percent of crime victims of known ethnicity were Asian, a similar situation to Alameda
County.
But leaders of the Bay Area Asian community said crime statistics are misleading because Asian American residents, especially immigrants, often do not report assaults or robberies out of mistrust of the system or language barriers. What is incontrovertible, said leaders of the Asian American community nationwide, is that the pandemic created a climate of fear and a feeling of insecurity from New York to California. In the past week the California Legislature approved $1.4 million in funding to track and research racist incidents against Asian Americans.
Watson’s lawyer, Sliman Nawabi, a public defender, said his client would not have been able to identify Vicha’s ethnicity through his face mask, cap and winter clothing. Nawabi described Watson as someone who had struggled with anger.
In the hours before the attack, Watson had a string of setbacks. He left his home because of a family dispute and got in a traffic accident in San Francisco at 2 a.m. He was cited by the San Francisco police for running a stop sign and reckless driving and then slept that night in his car.
On that morning a number of security cameras in the area captured Watson banging a car with his hand, according to Boudin, the district attorney.
“It appears that the defendant was in some sort of a temper tantrum,” Boudin said.
It was then that Vicha walked up Anzavista Avenue, a street with views of skyscrapers in the city’s financial district.
A witness told police officers that Watson said something to the effect of, “What are you looking at?” A security camera located inside a neighbor’s apartment captured Watson charging across the pavement toward Vicha, who briefly turned to his assailant before the impact.