A 41-year-old Fullerton man was sentenced to a year in jail Thursday after pleading guilty to yelling a racial slur and throwing fists at a fellow in a parking lot on Labor Day.
Tyson Theodore Mayfield was originally charged with felony assault/hate crime causing injury with a sentencing enhancement for a prior strike conviction for mayhem in 2008 in Orange County, which could have landed him in state prison for six years.
The possessor of a swastika tattoo copped to a misdemeanor count of violating a victim’s civil rights and causing a violent injury.
On Sept. 4, Mayfield approached a man he did not know and who is Filipino and Turkish and asked to borrow a lighter. After the stranger informed he had no lighter, Mayfield became “agitated,” called the victim an unspecified racial slur and punched him multiple times, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s office.
A nearby witness called 9-1-1, Fullerton Police Department officers arrived, and Mayfield was arrested.
Prosecutors later revealed that Mayfield has that swastika on his right shoulder.
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.