False Report in Alpine Rape Investigated : Racial tension: Alpine attack, erroneously attributed to three Latinos, comes two weeks after an attack on a migrant encampment.

The Sheriff’s Department is attempting to determine why in a call to report a rape in Alpine Thursday night the assailants were initially said to be “three Mexicans” when the victim later told deputies that her assailant was a lone Anglo.

The confusion hampered the initial search for a suspect, because attention was focused on the community’s migrant encampment, which has been the focal point of mounting racial tensions in the East County community, Lt. Sylvester Washington said.

After someone at Alpine’s Ye Olde Tavern first called to report that “three Mexicans” had raped a woman a little after 6 p.m., talk in the bar turned to “going out there and playing vigilante,” bartender Laura Wright said.

The Sheriff’s Department stressed Friday that the woman had identified her attacker to deputies as a white man.

The incident came three weeks after an Anglo woman reported being raped by a Latino man who she said approached her with two other Latino men, and two weeks after at least six Anglo men wielding baseball bats descended on the migrant encampment--home to day laborers for several years--in a vigilante-style retaliation for the rape.

Three migrants were seriously injured in the baseball bat attack.

Thursday’s rape was not related to the other two incidents, which sparked an investigation by the Sheriff’s Department and a preliminary investigation by the FBI to determine if the civil rights of the battered Latino men were violated, authorities said.

The rape report call from the bar triggered a search of the creek-bed migrant encampment and surrounding areas. At the same time, other deputies arrived at the bar and interviewed the woman, she described her attacker as an Anglo man in his mid-20s with dark hair and a full beard, 6 feet tall and weighing about 200 pounds, who was wearing a dark blue shirt and blue denim jeans.

No one has been arrested in connection with the sexual assault, which the woman said occurred after she got off a public bus and started walking toward the 2500 block of Alpine Boulevard.

“We don’t know how that came out,” Washington said of the confusion. “I’m having tapes made of the radio call, so we can know exactly who said what.”

Washington said the victim described her attacker as one lone Anglo male when she was interviewed at the bar, and later, when she was interviewed again at a hospital.

Wright said the woman, who lives in San Diego but goes to Alpine regularly to visit a friend, went into the bar dressed but shoeless. Her handbag had been emptied, and she was sitting in the corner holding her throat when another bartender, who knows the woman, approached her to see what was wrong.

The Thursday incident highlights the fragile nature of Alpine’s current calm.

“After she came in here and everybody got talking about it, it was three Mexicans who had done it to her,” Wright said. “There were two Mexican males in here also. But they didn’t stay here very long. The talk around here was everybody going out to play vigilante. That they need to put an end to it.”

Wright said she had no idea how anyone could confuse three Latino men with one white man, but she said patrons at the bar have generally supported the actions of the six to eight white men who severely beat three migrants with bats Oct. 1.

“The general attitude was ‘good for them,’ ” she said.

Two of the three men attacked had just arrived at the camp the day before. The third has worked for a Santee motorcycle shop for more than a year and returns to his wife and two daughters in Mexicali on weekends.

“I’m thinking it’s ‘three Hispanic males’ hysteria,” Lt. Washington said of the erroneous report. “I’m hoping the investigation will determine that.”

The rape several weeks ago, and the Oct. 1 attack on the migrants were triggered by mounting tensions over the migrant encampment. Some Alpine residents have blamed the migrants for an increase in crime, and, although the migrants themselves say some of the men shoplift and drink a lot, many feel they are being unfairly made scapegoats.

The vigilante-style bat attack prompted the Sheriff’s Department to dispatch two extra detective teams to Alpine to investigate the rape and the attack.

Friday, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman said investigators are nearing the end of both investigations.

“We have made substantial progress in both the (Sept. 24) rape and the attack investigations,” Sheriff’s Sgt. Glenn Revell said. “My sense from the investigative team is that they are close to completing their investigation and to resolving both issues. I understand informally that we expect a successful resolution, probably next week.”

Revell said investigators would not comment on details of the investigation.