Suspect in acid attack had earlier conviction
Incident involved hunters on Wisconsin farm
The man under arrest in Friday’s acid attack on Milwaukee’s south side was convicted in an earlier incident of false imprisonment involving hunters on family land in northern Wisconsin.
Clifton A. Blackwell, 61, was arrested Saturday, hours after the Friday night confrontation that left Mahmud Villalaz, 42, with second-degree burns on his face. Villalaz said his attacker made anti-immigrant remarks to him and threw the acid right after Villalaz responded by saying he is a U.S. citizen.
According to his mother, Blackwell has been under the care of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Milwaukee for post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from earlier service in the Marine Corps.
Jacqueline P. Blackwell, 83, of California, a psychologist and retired administrator with the San Jose Unified School District, said her son “needed to have some help and decided to move to Milwaukee” to get it. She said she had not been in touch with him recently and had not heard anything about his arrest.
“I was comfortable that he was getting good care with the VA,” she said.
“Once you’ve been in the service, you look at the world a different way,” she said, noting she and her husband had also served in the military. “I don’t know if people can understand if they haven’t been there.”
Blackwell spent at least some time in northern Wisconsin. In 2006, he was
charged in Rusk County with two counts each of pointing a firearm at someone and false imprisonment.
According to the criminal complaint, on Nov. 19 of that year he called the sheriff after riding his tractor out to four men, two with rifles, who had come onto his farm field in the Town of Lawrence, tracking a deer. Blackwell pointed a loaded rifle at the men and told them to disarm, then marched them back to his house where he photographed their faces and hunting tags and told them they were guilty of criminal trespass.
Blackwell called the sheriff’s office but wound up charged himself. Prosecutors dropped one of each of the charges, and Blackwell pleaded no contest to one count each of pointing a firearm and false imprisonment. He was sentenced to 379 days in jail.
Milwaukee police records show Blackwell was arrested about 9:20 a.m. Saturday near South 13th Street and West Edgerton Avenue and that he was detained early Sunday. He had not been booked at the Milwaukee County Jail as of late Monday afternoon.
Suspects in mental crisis are sometimes detained in hospitals until they are safe to be taken to jail.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is naming Blackwell before charges are filed because of the high-profile nature of the case and verification of his arrest available through public records.
Mayor says Trump feeds anti-immigrant feelings
Mayor Tom Barrett said Monday he was horrified by the weekend acid attack and blamed it in part on President Donald Trump’s attitudes feeding antiimmigrant fervor.
“You don’t begin a conversation with a racial slur and end it by throwing acid in someone’s face,” Barrett said at a brief news conference at City Hall Monday morning. “This is not what happens in a just society.”
Barrett said he is concerned that such attitudes are “condoned at the highest levels of government.”
“This anger toward people from other countries is being fed by our president and by his followers,” Barrett said. He said he was not drawing a direct causal link between any specific exhortations and Friday’s attack because he doesn’t know what exactly was in the suspect’s mind.
Villalaz suffered second-degree burns to his face after the brief confrontation near South 13th and West Cleveland streets.
According to Villalaz, who spoke at a news conference Saturday, the attack occurred about 8:30 p.m. when Villalaz parked his truck outside La Sierrita Restaurant, 2689 S. 13th St., and began to head inside for dinner.
Villalaz said the man first approached him to tell him he had parked illegally.
“‘You cannot park here. You are doing something illegal,’” Villalaz recalled the man saying.
The comments quickly adopted an anti-immigrant tone, Villalaz said.
“‘Why did you come here and invade my country?’” Villalaz said the man asked him.
Villalaz, who immigrated to the U.S. from Peru as a young man, ignored the man and moved his truck one block forward. As he returned to the restaurant, the man began accusing him anew of being in the U.S. illegally.
Villalaz responded that people come here for a better life and that he is a U.S. citizen. That seemed to further anger the suspect, Villalaz said, and he suddenly threw acid.
Villalaz ran into La Sierrita to wash the acid from the left side of his face.
Barrett said he had not spoken with District Attorney John Chisholm and did not know if the offense would be charged as a hate crime.
“To suggest that because the tone of his skin that he needs to leave this country, that’s not America, that’s not the
America I know or that we should know.”
U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, said she was “horrified to learn about this violent act of hate,” sent sympathy to Villalaz and his family and thanked the Milwaukee Police Department for acting quickly.
“No person should feel vulnerable because of their ethnicity or identity,” Moore said in a statement. “The bigotry and hatred driving the nationwide rise in hate crimes aims to sow division, but Milwaukee will not stand for it. Instead, we must continue to embrace and love our neighbors. The fabric of our communities is strengthened by our diversity, which makes Milwaukee such a special place to live.”
Data collected by the FBI showed a 17% increase in hate crimes across the U.S. in 2017, the third annual increase in a row. Anti-Hispanic incidents increased by 24%, from 344 in 2016 to 427 in 2017, according to the FBI data. Of crimes motivated by hatred over race, ethnicity or ancestry, nearly half involved African Americans, while about 11% were classified as anti-Hispanic bias.
Journal Sentinel reporter Bill Glauber and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Contact Bruce Vielmetti at (414) 2242187 or bvielmetti@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ProofHearsay.