A Lake Forest man accused of having white power tattoos could get up to six years in state prison after allegedly threatening to kill Persian hookah lounge customers, prosecutors say.
Andrew Alan Carruthers, 29, was charged Tuesday with felony criminal threats, misdemeanor resisting arrest, obstructing an officer and violating civil rights as well as a sentencing enhancement for hate crime, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s office, which adds six years in prison is the maximum sentence for a conviction on those counts.
Carruthers is accused of walking into BluFig Hookah Lounge, 20672 Lake Forest Dr., around 9 p.m. Friday “and acting aggressively toward the patrons, who were mainly of Persian descent,” the OCDA states in an arraignment advisory.
An employee asked Carruthers to leave, but he allegedly reentered multiple times and threatened to kill people in the lounge, prosecutors claim.
A lounge patron called 9-1-1 and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department was dispatched to the scene, where Carruthers is accused of running from deputies down Lake Forest Drive before surrendering.
“The defendant is accused of having visible tattoos of symbols associated with white supremacy,” the OCDA advisory states.
Drew Carruthers posts photos on Facebook of himself wearing a “Fuck Isis” t-shirt that appears to be similar to the one worn in the booking photo above. The Facebook page also includes images of the poster in a ball cap with the logo “Whiteboy” or shirtless with a tattoo across his chest that reads “Hate Boy.”
Elsewhere on the same Facebook page is a “Make America Great Again” logo.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.