Prosecution Lays Evidence Upside Down in Pacific Beach Riot Case – Jury Hears Opening Statements

By Ken Stone / Times of San Diego / April 2, 2024

Dressed in fear-inducing “black bloc,” antifa members Jeremy White and Brian Lightfoot Jr. traveled from Los Angeles spoiling for a fight in Pacific Beach, prosecutors said.

Wearing outfits to avoid being doxxed or injured, the defendants aimed to confront far-right Donald Trump fans and protect likeminded counterprotestors three days after the Capitol invasion, their lawyers said.

On Tuesday, a jury of nine women and three men (with four alternates) heard opening statements in a downtown Superior Court criminal case attracting national attention. They’ll hear wildly contrasting accounts of the “Patriot March” beginning near Crystal Pier on Jan. 9, 2021.

Lightfoot and White are the last of 11 original defendants. Nine pleaded guilty, and one is nearly done serving a prison sentence.

Brian Cortez Lightfoot Jr., 27, and Jeremy Jonathan White, 41, face charges that include conspiracy to commit a riot. Prosecutors allege the pair played roles in a series of assaults on members of the pro-Trump crowd.

Deputy District Attorney Makenzie Harvey told jurors they would not be judging the political stances of anyone involved, but whether crimes were committed “against unprovoked victims.”

(In fact, Judge Daniel Goldstein ruled earlier — out of earshot of jurors — that the defense couldn’t mention “Proud Boys” and “Three Percenters” as being among the rally-goers.)

[The Rag has been following this case for 3 years: See this, this, this and this.

• • At Least 5 Capitol Insurrectionists Were at Violent Pacific Beach Clash
  • It Is Unacceptable That Only Left-Wing Counterprotesters Are Arrested From January Clash With Trump Supporters in Pacific Beach]

But prosecutor Harvey began her 44-minute multimedia presentation by citing the freedom of speech and assembly — “one of the most sacred rights guaranteed to every citizen regardless of opinion, politics or the ideology that speech is grounded in.”

Harvey then cited equal protection of the law.

“Also a constitutional guarantee [that] protects every victim from violence regardless of their ideology, their politics, their opinions or beliefs,” she said. “Put very simply, this is a case about these two defendants … who came to San Diego with a number of co-conspirators with the intention to shut down the speech and the assembly of a patriot group for the simple fact that they didn’t agree with their beliefs.”

Harvey later said jurors wouldn’t be asked their opinion of the Patriot group — “of those people who support former President Donald Trump. You will not be asked how you feel about the ideology of antifa, because having an ideology is not a crime.”

She outlined 11 “separate acts of violence” allegedly perpetrated by Lightfoot, White and other antifa members, who the prosecutor said converged on Pacific Beach in tactical gear and armed with weapons such as baseball bats, pepper spray and tasers.

Harvey said both Lightfoot and White pepper sprayed various people and either took part in or instigated incidents in which people were physically beaten by antifa members.

White’s attorney, Curtis Briggs, and Lightfoot’s lawyer, John Hamasaki, both working pro bono, argued their clients sought to defend counterprotesters from pro-Trump members trying to stir up violence.

Briggs, younger brother of San Diego attorney Cory Briggs, said White’s attendance as a medic was a “good thing, not a bad thing.” And noted how White won a congressional award for his social justice activism as a Bernie Sanders disciple.

But White also was depicted as a victim of “pretty much every violence possible” during his years of attending protests. (Briggs didn’t mention White’s plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.)

Hamasaki, counsel for Lightfoot, warned the jury against “guilt by association” and described his client — hoping to become a wildland firefighter — as having grown up as one of eight children of a single mother in the tough Crenshaw neighborhood — “but didn’t get involved with gangs, drugs or street life.”

He said Lightfoot wanted to be part of the “fight against fascism.”

But prosecutors immediately objected when Hamasaki made a reference to the 17-year-old designer of a flyer for the Patriot March as a white supremacist and mentioned Proud Boys and Three Percenters as being in the pro-Trump crowd.

Goldstein called a brief break and excused the jury.

He told the defense attorneys he’d ruled seven times against allowing mention of the extremist right-wing groups.

“I don’t want to have a trial that the Proud Boys were involved,” Goldstein said.

Hamasaki told the jury: “You folks didn’t get an easy case. It’s a complicated case. It’s a messy case. … Some of the things you’ll see are ugly. I’m not asking you to like [Lightfoot], approve of him. Some of you will say: ‘Did you have to do that?’”

But he appealed for an eventual verdict of not guilty on all counts based on the evidence and the law.

“Not everybody was out there with good intentions,” Hamasaki said. “The idea that they were out there just looking for a peaceful Patriot March — I think the evidence will show that is not correct. Some of these people out here were looking for trouble, were looking for conflict, and were looking for a fight.”

The defense played videos recorded by one of the prosecution’s listed victims, a man who live-streamed his interactions with a group of people at the protest.

The man was punched and pepper sprayed by a group of people, but defense attorneys say before that happened, the man declared on his stream, “This is going to be good content,” that he was “going into combat mode” and that some of the antifa crowd members “are going to lose some teeth.”

He also vowed to “crush their esophaguses.”

After several insults and yelling, a brawl ensues. One person swung a skateboard at the man, who later says, “I purposely did that to trigger him” in regard to the insults he directed at the crowd.

Another group of people who were allegedly pepper sprayed by Lightfoot and beaten by others were armed with a knife and a Glock handgun that turned out to be a replica, the defense attorney said.

Such frightening weapons “set the tone for the day” and clashes that followed, Briggs said.

White is accused of pointing out a man to antifa members, who then chased the man down and attacked him.

Briggs said that moments before, a member of the pro-Trump crowd threw a green-smoke grenade toward a large crowd. The attorney said White was not pointing at the man who was beaten, but rather toward an empty alleyway to show protesters that no one else was there to potentially attack them.

“Please ask yourself when the prosecutors put their witnesses on if you’re getting the whole story,” Briggs told the jury. “Please pay close attention to whether the people on the stand have bias, whether they’re really victims or not, and approach the prosecution’s case with healthy skepticism.”

The trial may last at least four weeks. Both Lightfoot and White are expected to testify in two or three weeks.

But first comes the prosecution case, which began Tuesday with San Diego police Detective Michael Wagner.

Wagner, of the criminal intelligence unit, said he was dressed in long-sleeve T-shirt while taking pictures and video of the Pacific Beach violence.

He said he saw 40-50 counterprotestors “all kitted out” — the largest such group he’d ever seen — with a few carrying black-and-red antifa flags.

He said the Patriot group was “nonconfrontational, not creating any problems.” And he narrated a number of video clips not involving the defendants.

Upon cross-examination, Wagner conceded he didn’t witness several key clashes in person — and didn’t take measurements of the alley incident crucial to White’s guilt or innocence.

Wagner said measurements are taken only for homicide or traffic cases. He also said: “I’ve watched so much video, it’s all blurring together.”

But when prosecutor Harvey had a chance for redirect examination, Wagner stressed how traumatic that day was: “We’re human. We have a soul,” and this particular protest was “so violent, it’s ingrained in my brain.”

Briggs previously sought to have the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office disqualified from prosecuting the case and replaced with the California Attorney General’s Office.

He argued that San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan’s office showed bias by prosecuting only anti-fascists and not those who attended the event in support of Trump.

Briggs said Stephan’s office has a history of declining to prosecute members of far-right organizations who commit violence. His motion was ultimately denied by Goldstein.

Among the two dozen people in Courtroom 1901’s gallery was Tasha Williamson, the social justice crusader who once ran for mayor of San Diego.

During an afternoon break, she told Times of San Diego her interest in the case.

“Because I believe that the DA’s office is trying to prevent people from protesting,” Williamson said. “Yeah, my interest is that the DA opened her opening statement with lies — and that they tainted this jury. And that’s not OK.”

The District Attorney’s Office has said in prior public statements that “video evidence analysis shows that overwhelmingly the violence in this incident was perpetrated by the antifa affiliates and was not a mutual fray with both sides crossing out of lawful First Amendment expression into riot and violence.”