Killing's `Racial Motive' Blamed On Police -- Metzger Witness Says He Was Forced To Plea-Bargain

PORTLAND - A young skinhead serving a life sentence in an Oregon prison for clubbing and kicking an Ethiopian man to death here two years ago told a jury hearing a $10 million wrongful-death lawsuit that police pressured him into swearing there were racial overtones to the killing.

Ken Mieske, 22, alias Ken Death, said he pleaded guilty to the murder of Mulugeta Seraw only after police convinced him he'd face state and federal charges if he didn't do so.

Mieske said he was led to believe he'd never get out of prison if he didn't plea-bargain and admit to a racial motive he swore didn't exist.

Furthermore, said Mieske, those witnesses who said he hit Seraw three times with a baseball bat were ``all lying.''

He had only hit Seraw once with the bat, Mieske said, and that was almost self-defense, to stop Seraw from choking his fellow skinhead, Kyle Brewster, into unconsciousness.

When Seraw fell to the pavement, Mieske said, he did get a bit carried away and kicked Seraw in the stomach and then in the head with his steel-toed boots. He left Seraw curled up in a ball in the street.

Mieske's dramatic denial of his confession highlighted the fourth day of a civil suit brought by the Seraw family against Mieske, Brewster and two of the nation's most prominent racists, Tom Metzger, 52, and his son, John, 22, of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), based in Fallbrook, Calif.

The plaintiffs contend that the Metzgers sent lieutenants to Portland to organize the city's East Side White Pride Skinheads and incite racial violence.

Morris Dees of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, one of two attorneys representing the Seraw family, brought to the stand two eyewitnesses to Seraw's murder to refute Mieske's testimony.

Heidi Martinson, 20, the girlfriend of Steven Strasser, the third skinhead serving time in prison for the murder of Seraw, testified she saw Mieske swing his bat twice toward the pavement in a clubbing motion.

She said the confrontation easily could have been avoided if the driver of the car in

which she and the skinheads were riding

had simply driven around a car blocking their path in a residential district. That car contained two of Seraw's African-American friends who were bringing Seraw home from a party. Seraw was in the street chatting with his friends.

Martinson said the hot-tempered Brewster - fresh from a skinhead party - first told the blacks, rather politely, to move their car. When they didn't, he began screaming racial epithets and obscenities.

She said the skinheads then piled out of the car, kickedout the windows of the other car and smashed the windshield with the baseball bat. Then they headed for Seraw, who had turned away to walk to his apartment. When Brewster attacked him, Seraw began to fight back, Martinson said.

She said Mieske ended that fight when he swung the baseball bat, in a roundhouse swing, and sent Seraw sprawling.

Julie Belec Sanders, who was 16 when she shared a basement apartment with Mieske in her mother's home, testified she saw Mieske come up behind Seraw and hit him on the head with the bat to break up the fight between Seraw and Brewster.

Neither witness said she saw Seraw choking Brewster.

Both said that when the skinheads and their girlfriends fled the scene, they were certain the man left behind in a pool of blood would die.

Dees hammered away at links between the East Side White Pride Skinheads and the Metzgers, links Mieske said didn't exist.

There was a letter from John Metzger to Mieske, telling him he was sending Dave Mazzella, vice president of White Aryan Youth, up to Portland to see how things were going with the skinheads.

The jury was shown the front page of Tom Metzgers' White Aryan Resistance Newspaper, which bore photographs of Tom and John Metzger, Mieske and Brewster.

Telephone- company logs show that the day Mazzella arrived in Portland he put in a call to Tom Metzger and then put Mieske on the line to say hello.

Mieske called Tom Metzger from jail when he was arrested for Seraw's murder and asked what he should do. ``Keep your mouth shut and plead the Fifth'' was Metzger's advice, said Mieske.

Mieske's girlfriend, Julie Sanders, went to Whidbey Island when the Metzgers staged a memorial service for Robert Mathews, who founded a militant neo-Nazi organization called The Order. Mathews died in a fire during a shootout with FBI agents in 1984.

Although Sanders testified she and Mieske had anti-black and antisemitic posters on the walls of the bedroom they shared, she, Martinson and Mieske all said they read very little of the Metzgers' literature. Mieske said that one of the few times he handled the WAR newspaper, except to look at a few racist cartoons, was when he and fellow East Side White Pride skinheads went to downtown Portland to distribute copies brought by Mazzella.

On the witness stand, Mieske, a heavy-metal musician, refused Dees' request to read aloud to the jury a violence-filled poem found among his belongings.

``No, I'm not going to read this. This has nothing to do with the case,'' Mieske said defiantly. However, Circuit Court Judge Ancer Haggerty directed Dees to read it.

The poem concluded ``senseless violence is my favorite game. Burn their smelly corpses in the ground.''

Mieske winced. He had testified earlier that he had cut up into small pieces the bat with which he killed Seraw and had then attempted to burn the wood. Police later found pieces of charred bat.

``All heavy-metal stuff is about violence and death,'' said Mieske. ``It doesn't mean anything. I've gone to hundreds of horror movies, too, but I don't go around with a chain saw cutting people up on the street.''