Activists Say Suspect in ‘Grandma Huang’ Killing Shook the Asian Community

More than five years after the brutal beating of Yik Oi Huang shook many in San Francisco’s Asian American community, the trial for a suspect charged with the attack — and a string of other violent crimes against Asian Americans — began Monday.

Keonte Gathron, 25, has been in custody since late January 2019, when he was charged in connection with seven attacks, including Huang’s beating, multiple armed robberies, a kidnapping and two carjackings.

He’s facing more than two dozen counts ranging from elder abuse and felony robbery to murder, upgraded from attempted murder after Huang died a year after her attack. If convicted, he could face life in prison.

None of the alleged criminal encounters have been officially called a hate crime, and during his opening statement, Assistant District Attorney Nathan Quigley did not allege that Asian Americans were directly targeted.

But six of Gathron’s seven alleged victims were of Asian descent. Asian Justice Movement organizer Charles Jung said even without that distinction, the pattern speaks for itself.

And the effect on the community, he said, has been the same.

“When someone allegedly victimizes multiple people of the same ethnicity in rapid succession, as is alleged, the impact is the same, I would say,” he told KQED. “It has the impact of terrorizing a community and making people feel unsafe because of who they are.”

Quigley laid out the harrowing series of Gathron’s attacks to the jury in great detail, first illustrating how he knocked over Dhung My Chung from behind, stealing his keys and driving off in his car on Jan. 3, 2019.

The next day, Quigley alleged that Gathron robbed Guifeng Yu on the street at gunpoint, grabbing his phone and cash before demanding Yu lead him back to his home.

Yu, who lives alone, instead led Gathron to a family member’s home nearby, hoping they would be there to help.

Instead, the house was empty when they arrived. As Gathron ransacked the place, Yu ran to hide in a locked room. Among the items he allegedly stole was a gold necklace that closely resembled one Gathron is seen wearing in surveillance footage captured at the scenes of his later crimes.

Gathron was also accused of stealing the car of a man dropping his wife off at a bus stop on Vicente Avenue in the Sunset, days later, pointing a pistol at him and demanding the keys to his Jeep. He then allegedly stole phones from two minors at gunpoint. Quigley said he let a third teenager — his only non-Asian victim — go with her phone after she told him she needed it for school.

The most high-profile of the attacks occurred in the middle of his alleged spree, on Jan. 8. Gathron is accused of attacking 88-year-old Yik Oi Huang, who was known affectionately by many in the Visitation Valley neighborhood as “Grandma Huang,” while she was practicing her usual qigong, a traditional Chinese exercise that combines movement, breathing and meditation, at a local park.

Before sunrise, Huang had walked to the Leland Avenue park across the street from her home. According to Quigley, Gathron allegedly approached her there, beat her and stole her keys. He left her lying in the sand under a slide, bloodied and hidden from street view by a recycling bin.

The suspect then went to Huang’s home, where a neighbor saw him and called the police. After they arrived and found her home empty, Huang’s son-in-law retraced her steps, finding her at the playground.

Her shirt had been pulled up, her pants pulled down and she had sustained severe head injuries. Huang was taken to the hospital and eventually placed in long-term care until she died almost a year later, on Jan. 3, 2020.

“She suffered through the massive pain and had been clinging for her life courageously,” her family wrote on a GoFundMe page set up to help pay for her funeral expenses after her death.

“Today it was very hard to watch the timeline being put together,” Jung said following the city’s opening statement. “Seeing the pictures and the video, that brought me to tears.”

Gathron, who is defending himself, will deliver his remarks on Tuesday.

The attack sent shockwaves through Visitation Valley, where Huang had lived for nearly two decades. She immigrated from Toi San, China, in 1986, moving into an SRO in Chinatown while she worked as a seamstress and nanny, according to her memorial website.

Eventually, when all of her children were able to immigrate to the U.S., the family pooled together enough to move into their Visitacion Valley home.

Over nearly 20 years, Huang’s family said she became a community presence — often walking with friends around the park or leading the Visitacion Valley Friendship Club, an advocacy and senior group serving her Chinese immigrant neighbors.

After her death, the community renamed the park in her honor. The “Yik Oi Peace & Friendship Park” was dedicated last June.

“The renaming effort is unifying us with the goals of ending cycles of violence and healing long-simmering cultural and racial divisions,” said Anne Seeman, cofounder of Visitacion Valley Greenway.

While the attack and the other crimes Gathron allegedly committed occurred more than a year before anti-Asian hate and rhetoric exploded in response to the spread of COVID-19, Jung believes the violence was symptomatic of a problem that predates the coronavirus pandemic.

“What stood out to me … was that [six] of the victims were of Asian-American descent. That, in my perspective, is disturbing and I think kind of confirms the community’s fears about this particular wave [of anti-Asian hate],” he said. “I think you could describe it as a harbinger of the visibility and the anti-Asian violence that we saw during the pandemic.

“That [violence], we already knew was plaguing the community.”

KQED’s Katherine Monahan contributed to this report.

Sept. 23: A previous version of this story misspelled the last name of Asian Justice Movement organizer Charles Jung as Juang. It has been updated.