A southern California man was charged Monday with assault and committing a hate crime after allegedly driving his car against a crowd of blacks last month, authorities said Monday.
Dennis Wyman, 42, of Redondo Beach, beat a 50-year-old off-duty security guard after shouting racial slurs at the group shortly before midnight June 29, a spokeswoman for the Torrance Police Department said in a statement.
The crowd was in the parking lot of a hotel in the Los Angeles county town, police said. There were no details on why the group had met or how many people joined.
The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office said the injured guard was the father of the man in the crowd and that he had come to the hotel parking lot to help the group.
The guard fired several bullets into the car before it hit him, police said. The man was injured and was taken to a hospital, though authorities did not say how seriously he was injured.
Wyman, who is white, then allegedly fled, police said. Additional details about the confrontation were not immediately available.
Wyman was charged with assault with a deadly weapon that resulted in major bodily injury, hit and run, and hate crime, the district attorney’s office said.
Wyman was being held on $ 115,000 bail, according to the statement. Court records did not include an attorney for him.
