Thursday, Jun 03, 1999 Cops blast flyers on tourist's killing Racial motivation for killing suggested By Jim Herron Zamora OF THE EXAMINER STAFF A San Bruno-based organization founded by a retired San Francisco cop came under fire from police after it posted flyers in the Russian Hill neighborhood suggesting that the slaying of a tourist last week was racially motivated. About a dozen of the flyers ‹ reading "Zebra killings. Never again!" ‹ turned up this week in a two- to three-block area surrounding the site where the tourist, Shayne Worcester of Maine, was fatally shot during a robbery. By Wednesday morning, most of them had been torn down, and none of the dozen or so area residents interviewed by The Examiner even knew of their existence. The Zebra killings referred to in the flyers were a series of street attacks throughout The City that began in October 1973 in San Francisco. By the time five suspects were arrested six months later, 14 men and women had been slain and seven wounded, including Art Agnos, who later became The City's mayor in 1988-92. Prosecutors maintained that the suspects were black revolutionaries who were randomly targeting whites to provoke a race war. Worcester, a 29-year-old aspiring filmmaker, was shot in the head a week ago during a robbery on Vallejo Street. Police believe Worcester's killers are black. Worcester was white. Lt. David Robinson, head of the Police Department's homicide team, said Wednesday that there was no evidence that Worcester's slaying had been racially motivated. He called the flyers and the organization that posted them irresponsible, inflammatory and wrong. "Unless these people have some evidence that we haven't seen, it is irresponsible and inflammatory to put out this misinformation..." Robinson said. "This doesn't help us solve the crime." The organization responsible for the flyers, the European/American Issues Forum, was formed to call attention to hate crimes against people of European ancestry, said its founder, retired San Francisco police officer Louis Calabro. Calabro conceded that he didn't know whether Worcester's slaying was racially motivated, but said it could have been. "The severity of the attack indicates that it may be racially motivated," Calabro said. "The purpose of the flyers is to alert the community that there is a problem. These people just came in there from somewhere else and apparently executed this poor man." Worcester, who was in The City visiting friends, was attacked as he walked with an old high school chum along Vallejo Street at Hyde Street. Although he offered no resistance and told his two assailants that his money was in his wallet, he was shot at close range in the back of the head, police said. He died at San Francisco General Hospital about 10 hours later. Despite a $28,000 reward being offered, no one has been arrested in the case.
