2 charged in racist attack on Antioch home
Enraged by some sort of dispute, an East Bay couple hurled Molotov cocktails at an Antioch family’s house last week and spray-painted racist graffiti on its facade, leading to their arrest on hate-crime charges, police said Tuesday.
The details of the firebombing were revealed as officials said they arrested and charged Christyne Gail McDaniel and Roy Charles Sorvari with crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder and arson. Sorvari is a self-described former Boy Scout and crimefighting superhero who calls himself “The Ray,” according to a 2011 profile in a San Francisco newspaper.
“Any time something like this happens in our community, we’re shocked,” Antioch Police Chief Allan Cantando said at a news conference Tuesday.
He added that the incident stemmed from a dispute between a relative of McDaniel and “one person at the victims’ residence.” Cantando would not elaborate on the motive for the attack, saying only, “It wasn’t something that was random.”
“I’m just glad the people who were responsible were caught and I can rest a little better at night,” said Roshon Williams, whose home was targeted in the fiery attack allegedly by the two suspects, whom she said she did not know.
McDaniel, 25, of Brentwood and Sorvari, a 27-year-old Antioch resident, are accused of throwing the Molotov cocktails at the African American family’s home on the 5100 block of McCormick Court shortly after 3 a.m. on Sept. 7 — an attack that was partially captured on security video and shocked the eastern Contra Costa County community.
Seven people were at home, including four children, when the suspects began the alleged barrage, police said. One suspect was seen in security video running from the scene, while some of the adults inside the house ran out and used a garden hose to douse their burning roof, garage and bushes.
Firefighters scrambled to the home in minutes and extinguished the remaining flames. No one was injured, and the house was relatively unscathed in the fiery assault.
The residents later discovered swastikas and a racial epithet scrawled on the side of the home in blue spray paint. Investigators released security video of the attack the next day that showed a shadowy figure on the sidewalk hurling the burning bottles of flammable liquid at the home.
That same day, McDaniel and Sorvari turned themselves in to Antioch police for questioning and were soon taken into custody, officials said.
The two were charged by the Contra Costa County district attorney on Tuesday with assault with a deadly weapon, arson and conspiracy to commit murder, mayhem and torture. The two were also hit with hate-crime enhancements.
Six days before the arrests, McDaniel posted on Facebook that Sorvari’s car had been vandalized. In the post, she said her sister and her sister’s “cheating ex-boyfriend” had recently traded damage to one another’s vehicles. Police did not say if that dispute had anything to do with the Molotov cocktail attack.
Sorvari was the subject of a 2011 San Francisco Weekly profile that toggles between the skinny Mormon and former Boy Scout, and “The Ray,” his bizarre crime-fighting alter ego who wears goggles, a gas mask and shin pads, and was once caught by police carrying a stun gun.
“His enemy: what he sees as an invading army of thugs — the poor, usually black, residents who have moved into Antioch from San Francisco, Richmond, and Oakland,” San Francisco Weekly wrote.
Sorvari went on to tell the paper, “I’m not a Nazi, an anarchist, or a racist.”
But after the story ran, the wanna-be crime fighter was ousted from his band of costumed troublemakers, known as “the Nor Cal Protectorate,” according to a follow up story in the newspaper.
Sorvari’s friends gave him the option of “team-approved sensitivity training” that entailed visiting an African American museum, which Sorvari declined to do, saying he had “no interest in being politically correct,” San Francisco Weekly wrote.
Reached by phone Tuesday, Sorvari’s mother, Lynn, declined to comment.
Last week’s attack created unease in the diverse inland East Bay city, where many residents were stunned by the apparently racially inspired crime.
“When we talk about racial hate, racial slurs, it’s bad. It’s simply bad,” Victoria Adams, president of the East County branch of the NAACP, said. “There’s no excuse for this here.”
“When we talk about racial hate, racial slurs, it’s bad. It’s simply bad. There’s no excuse for this here.” Victoria Adams, president of the East County branch of the NAACP