Published: Monday, June 3, 2002

Long Beach Press Telegram

Anarchists rally for man jailed in L.B.

By David Rogers

Staff writer

LONG BEACH … About 40 self-described anarchists marched noisily but peacefully from the downtown Lincoln Park to the Long Beach Police Department to support a jailed Long Beach man they allege was targeted and framed for his anarchist views.

Matthew Lamont, 20, was arrested April 20 with a 17-year-old driver in La Habra while allegedly putting together a Molotov cocktail in the back of a car. But Sheila Ketablain of the Long Beach Anarchist Defense Committee said Lamont was targeted.

"He participated in a lot of community organizing … feeding the homeless, monitoring police abuse, organizing demonstrations," Ketablain said at a rally at the park before the march to the police department.

She said that Lamont's attorneys will argue that "the Long Beach police have engaged in a conspiracy to violate the civil rights of local activists, especially Matt Lamont, and those involved in working at the Long Beach Info Shop," an anarchist bookshop and meeting space.

Long Beach Police Department spokesman Sgt. Steve Filippini denied that his officers had framed Lamont.

"We're in the business of public safety and not in the business of framing people," he said.

La Habra police officers arrested Lamont after Long Beach detectives reported seeing Lamont leave his house with an empty white plastic bottle, stop at a gas station and then go to a store and buy birthday candles that reignite.

"He had all the makings of a Molotov cocktail," Orange County Deputy District Attorney Tom Crofoot said last month, adding that Lamont was arrested partly because officers could smell gasoline from outside the car.

Crofoot said the La Habra officers found Lamont with a gasoline-filled plastic bottle and a gasoline-drenched sponge with the birthday candles stuck inside. Investigators said Lamont and the driver were going to the Moose Lodge in La Habra, where a celebration of Hitler's birthday was scheduled but later canceled.

But Geoffrey Kerns of the Defense Committee said that Lamont was arrested a few days after he tried to get a list from the police department of homeless people who were jailed before the Long Beach Grand Prix.

Kerns also took issue with a citation given to a fellow protester who spat on the sidewalk in view of police before the march to the police station.

"If any other person was walking down the street and spit on the sidewalk, do you honestly think they would get a citation?" he asked. "This is a very small example of the harassment that is going on here."