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The California lawyer who for years made sure that white supremacist Tom Metzger paid a judgment for his role in the murder of an Ethiopian studying in the United States did not take any money for himself from the case, but ended up with something invaluable: a son. .
Attorney James McElroy became close to the victim’s family and eventually adopted the man’s son, who was 7 years old at the time of the murder and became an airplane pilot. McElroy says the bond with his son is “the best rate I’ve ever received from a pro bono case.”
McElroy has been largely quiet about adoption. But he’s been more comfortable speaking in public since the 82-year-old Metzger died last week in Hemet, California, of complications from Parkinson’s disease.
McElroy, 69, worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to obtain a $ 12.5 million award against Metzger, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who was linked to the 1988 murder of Mulugeta Seraw, a 28-year-old college student who was beaten. overhead with a baseball bat in Portland, Oregon.
Three members of the East Side White Pride skinhead group were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. One of the men contacted Metzger before the attack. The trial against Metzger came after a trial in 1990 during which a recording of Metzger was heard praising the killers for performing what he called their “civic duty.”
Metzger lived in San Diego County, where McElroy is a civil rights attorney. McElroy volunteered to collect from Metzger for the next 20 years and deliver the money to the family of the murdered man.
He flew to Ethiopia to meet the Seraw family and liked the son of man. The mother worked for a bus company and earned the equivalent of about $ 20 a month.
McElroy asked permission to take the boy to San Diego for a summer.
“He already had a son and they just clicked,” McElroy said. “They learned to surf and to be a typical Southern California kid.”
He took the boy to a private school in Ethiopia. She then asked to adopt the child, and the mother agreed, grateful for the opportunities her son would have in the United States.
“We really came together and I wanted him to stay,” McElroy said. McElroy and his son’s mother are now communicating online and McElroy says they are “dear friends.”
The boy graduated from Torrey Pines High School in San Diego and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is now in his 30s, married, and a pilot for a major commercial airline.
His son “actually pursued his father’s dream” by receiving an education in the United States, McElroy said. “(He) was able to get out of this great and horrible tragedy.”
McElroy believes Metzger died without knowing anything about the relationship. The Associated Press does not identify her adopted son at the request of McElroy, who says he protects her privacy.
McElroy, former chairman of the board of the Southern Poverty Law Center, may be best known for his decades-long defiance of the presence of a 43-foot Latin cross atop Mount Soledad in San Diego, claiming the war memorial violated the US Constitution prohibits government favoring a religion.
The legal battle began in 1989 and ended after Mt. The Soledad Cross Association purchased the land in 2015 from its then owner, the United States Department of Defense.
Seraw’s assassination forced Portland, Oregon, to consider white supremacy. It also brought McElroy face to face with Metzger, who lived near Fallbrook and was near the peak of his notoriety.
Metzger ran for Congress from north San Diego County in the early 1980s, winning the Democratic primary. But he lost an overwhelming majority in the general election after Democrats and Republicans rallied against him.
He became a prominent media figure during those years, appearing on television shows, organizing white supremacist rallies and burning of crosses, and promising a white civil war that would result in “blood in the streets.”
Metzger couldn’t afford the damages against him. But he paid several hundred thousand dollars and McElroy achieved his goal: depriving Metzger and his organization, the White Aryan Resistance, of money to spread their influence.
McElroy took particular satisfaction in selling Metzger’s Fallbrook home to a Latino family as partial payment: “poetic justice,” he called it.
The two men met occasionally at a Fallbrook restaurant to discuss problems that arose. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department was keeping a close eye on Metzger and insisted on being notified before each meeting to observe from another table.
The men had “polite conversations,” but McElroy said he had Metzger’s racist words and actions in mind. They joked about his Midwestern roots. McElroy was born in Illinois and Metzger in Indiana.
Metzger was a hateful man in many ways. But, like all people, he was multidimensional. Sometimes it could be funny, ”McElroy said.
McElroy remembers the Metzger children putting their hands on wet concrete outside their home and their father using a nail to mark their palms with swastikas. McElroy’s hopes that the children would rebel against their father’s views were largely unfulfilled. One son, John, closely aligned himself with his father’s activities.
He considers Metzger one of the earliest proponents of the “lone wolf” theory that white supremacists are more effective acting alone than through KKK-favored marches and rallies.
Richard Cohen, who met McElroy when he came to San Diego to depose Metzger, said the attorney has “a huge heart.”
McElroy shed tears displaying photos of her son at a Southern Poverty Law Center meeting in 2015.
The son “is a beautiful man, and of course Jim takes all the credit,” Cohen said blankly.
Associated Press journalist John C. Rogers in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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