‘What trash are you speaking?’: A San Diego man beat a Syrian refugee teen for talking in Arabic

By Megan Flynn @ WashingtonPost.com, November 5, 2019 at 4:51 a.m. EST

There were plenty of open seats on the San Diego trolley, but Adrian Richard Vergara chose the one right next to a teenage Syrian refugee.

The teen boy felt nervous as Vergara sat down, he would later say. Traveling on his way home from school, he was talking on FaceTime with a friend, speaking in Arabic — when suddenly the man next to him ripped the earbud out of the boy’s ear.

“What trash are you speaking?” Vergara asked him, as prosecutors described at his arraignment last month.

And when the teen refugee responded, “Arabic,” prosecutors said, that’s when the brutal beating began

On Monday, Vergara, 26, pleaded guilty to the Oct. 15 felony hate-crime assault after surveillance video on the trolley identified him as the attacker. Vergara is expected to be sentenced next month to five years in prison, KGTV reported.

In a statement to KSWB last month, the 17-year-old refugee said he hoped to dispel mistaken beliefs among people who have never met Arabs or Muslims that they are dangerous, and encouraged other members of the community to go to the police if they are ever attacked like he was.

“To all the people who are attacking our community: Don’t judge us without knowing us,” he wrote.

The spontaneous attack shook San Diego’s refugee community, especially on the heels of another San Diego man’s unprovoked attack on three Muslim women wearing hijabs. In that Oct. 6 case, also charged as a hate crime, 50-year-old Kyle Allen allegedly shoved one of the women, slapped another and then tried to pull off the third woman’s hijab. Allen has pleaded not guilty.

The 17-year-old refugee on the trolley had been reading up on that case ― just days before his own attack, he told KSWB in a statement. [....]