Two Klan Leaders charged in stabbing

Incident occurred before Klan parade in North Carolina.

Two Ku Klux Klan leaders, including a California man who organized a violent “White Lives Matter” rally in Anaheim earlier this year, were arrested in North Carolina over the weekend in connection with a stabbing before a Klan parade celebrating the election of Donald Trump.

The Orange, California, man, William Hagen, 50, is the Grand Dragon of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a racist group active in the western United States. He and another Klan leader, Chris Barker, 37, were accused of stabbing a third Klan member, the Caswell County sheriff ’s office said in a statement late Tuesday. The two men appeared in court Wednesday.

The victim, Richard Dillon, 47, had stumbled into the lobby of the sheriff ’s office at 3:15 a.m. Saturday with several stab wounds to the chest, after a fight at a Klan meeting in Barker’s home in East Yanceyville, North Carolina, according to Captain Frank Rose, a sheriff ’s office spokesman. Dillon was treated at a local medical center and released.

The attack took place hours before a Ku Klux Klan parade Saturday in Roxboro, North Carolina, billed as a celebration of Trump’s victory. The president-elect has said he disavows the support of the Klan, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.

Hagen was in North Carolina to attend that parade, authorities said. Barker was arrested before the parade, and Hagen after, during a traffic stop, Rose said.

Hagen was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious injury, and Barker was charged with aiding and abetting assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious injury, the sheriff’s office said. Both men were being held in lieu of secured bond.

The Loyal White Knights group is among the most active in the United States, said Dr. Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. Hagen, who is also known as William Quigg, leads the white supremacist organization in the swath of the United States that stretches from Texas to California. The Anti-Defamation League identified Barker as the leader of the group’s wing in North Carolina, in a report released earlier this year.

Levin was present at the February rally in Anaheim, which law enforcement at the time described as an anti-immigration rally with the theme “white lives matter.” Roughly 30 anti-Klan protesters attacked two Klansmen at that rally, and two of them were later charged in connection with the melee.

He described Hagen as a Holocaust denier who traveled to South Carolina to protest the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the statehouse after nine African-Americans were killed by Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, in a mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.