NORTH COAST, Calif. – A Clearlake man has been sentenced to 15 years in state prison for his part in hate crime assaults that occurred last summer in Sonoma County.
Aaron Joseph Welch, 27, was sentenced last week in Sonoma County Superior Court for having allegedly been involved in the August 2012 attack in Santa Rosa on two black men, one of whom was stabbed repeatedly, according to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office.
Welch was arrested last October following a two-month investigation into the assaults, and charged with felonies including assault with a deadly weapon, gang enhancements, terrorist threats, dissuading a witness and a hate crime, as Lake County News has reported.
In January he reached a plea agreement on two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, with enhancements being admitted, according to Terry Menshek of the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office.
Welch’s defense attorney, Kristine Burk of the Sonoma County Public Defender’s Office, said Welch took responsibility for the act and, although the sentence is a lengthy one, he was potentially facing life in prison if he had been found guilty of the charge of attempting to dissuade a witness to benefit a gang.
One of the co-defendants in the case, Vanessa Michaels of Novato, is alleged to have tried to swat away a cell phone from one of the victims as he was trying to call 911, Burk said.
The plea agreement had Welch pleading to a count of assault with a deadly weapon, with hate crime and great bodily injury enhancements being admitted, and a second assault with a deadly weapon charge with no enhancement, Burk explained.
Burk said Welch also admitted to a gang enhancement of having committed the assault to benefit the Barbarian Brotherhood, which the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office said is a white supremacist criminal street gang to which Welch belongs.
“We didn’t contest that issue,” Burk said, although had the case gone to trial it might have been different.
Although Welch admitted to that gang enhancement, the punishment was stricken as part of the plea agreement, Burk said.
Because of a prior strike conviction, the first assault charge against Welch was doubled from four to eight years, according to Burk.
The two victims, found at the McDonald’s on Santa Rosa and Yolanda avenues early on the morning of last Aug. 26, had told Santa Rosa Police that they had been harassed and called racial slurs, with the suspects yelling “White Pride.”
An attempted knife attack had occurred, the suspects left and then returned, coming through some bushes. Welch was accused of stabbing one of the men in the shoulder and then several times in the leg after he fell to the ground, according to officials.
Menshek said the outcomes of cases against Welch’s two codefendants in the case, Michaels and Salvatore Bordessa of Windsor, are still pending. Both Bordessa and Michaels have upcoming hearings.
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