Lawyer Says Need For Family Pulled Woman Into Racist Group

SALEM, Ore. - Yolanda Cotton hasn't talked much since she was acquitted of murder in a racially motivated firebombing that killed two people.

But what the 20-year-old former skinhead did say in an interview with The Oregonian suggests she longed to belong, even to something destructive.

Her boyfriend and two friends were convicted of the murders April 8 and will be sentenced May 13.

Sean R. Edwards, 22, and Leon Tucker, 22, tossed the Molotov cocktails into a basement apartment on Sept. 26, killing Brian Mock, 45, and Hattie Mae Cohens, 29. Prosecutors said Edwards and Tucker were angry at some black friends of Cohens with whom they had fought earlier.

Cotton's boyfriend, Philip Wilson Jr., 21, helped make the incendiary devices and drove the pair to the Salem apartment.

Cotton, accused of helping to plan the revenge firebombing, was asleep in her apartment at the time of the fire.

Her attorney, Mark Geiger, believes that Cotton needed to fit in with friends as a "family substitute."

"In most families there is no condition for love," he said. "I think she felt she couldn't get love without . . . conditions. With her friends, one of those conditions may have been becoming a racist."

Edwards and Tucker had driven to the apartment where Cotton lived with Wilson to put together the Molotov cocktails. Cotton said she tried to talk Wilson out of participating.

Cotton had no family support at the six-week trial.

As a preschooler, she was raped and beaten by her mother's boyfriend, Geiger said during the trial. Cotton's mother, who was mentally retarded, was unable or unwilling to stop the abuse.

One day, when Cotton was about school age, her mother left on an errand. She never returned.

Cotton was eventually adopted by a foster family.

Her new father was a Baptist minister, and he and his wife had two older children. She soon became alienated from the family she describes as "really religious."

Once, she slit her wrists. She wore long sleeves to cover her arms but no one in the family noticed, Geiger said.

One Saturday night she took so many pills she began to vomit. Her parents insisted she attend church and never discussed the problem, Geiger said.

She ran away to Los Angeles and spent her 16th birthday at a concert. But the police eventually returned her home and she was placed under house arrest for six months.

She met Wilson at a Job Corps program in Reno. In 1991, they moved to Salem and the following year Cotton gave birth to a baby girl. But she and Wilson lacked money and gave up the infant for adoption.

A growing number of their friends in Salem were skinheads.

"It was trendy to be a skinhead," she said."You're not thinking what it's all about."

". . . I think I just woke up one morning . . . and it was easy to do, just say, `Okay, I'm a racist,' " Cotton said.

Cotton says she has renounced her racist views, but not her friends.