Abner Castro Gomez and Floridalma Marroquin were petrified last year when their neighbor pointed a pistol at them and their two children, ages 5 and 9, in the parking lot of their shared Beaverton apartment complex.

The couple, who’d moved to Oregon from Guatemala three years earlier, don’t speak much English. But they said they could clearly discern the man’s message — “Go back to your country!” —and the racist slurs that accompanied it.

The family made a beeline for their apartment, which Castro Gomez and Marroquin said their children then refused to leave for the better part of a week — missing three days of school — out of fear the man would track them down and kill them. The apartment complex forced the neighbor to move, but in interviews more than a year later, the couple told The Oregonian/OregonLive that they still scanned the faces of strangers out of fear that they might chance across their former neighbor again.

Feeding those fears was the 55-year-old Jeffrey Coble’s sentence: Probation and no jail time. Even though Coble ultimately escaped a hate-crime conviction as part of a plea deal, Oregon’s hate crime sentencing laws were still to blame.

“If he isn’t in jail, he might do something similar to other immigrants like us, and it might be worse, like using a weapon against them,” Castro Gomez said, through a Spanish interpreter.

Castro Gomez and his family have had a stunning firsthand introduction to Oregon’s hate crime sentencing laws, which require nothing more than probation for most offenders who haven’t seriously injured their victims and don’t have a history of violent criminal convictions. Jail sentences that might range from a few days to months are an option, but they hinge largely on the willingness of Oregon prosecutors to fight for them and on judges to approve them. Frequently, these offenders are sentenced to no time behind bars.

Oregon is among a handful of states leading the nation in supporting hate crime victims, including by creating statewide reporting hotlines and guaranteeing paid leave from work. But what constitutes a hate crime in Oregon is narrower than in many other states, meaning many victims see their attackers go unpunished.

Oregon fails victims in a second way — by declining to significantly punish or attempt to rehabilitate many offenders. Victims and their advocates say the one-two punch — a limited definition and lax sentencing — leaves many feeling let down.

“There was no justice for us,” Castro Gomez said.

Few options exist

The Oregonian/OregonLive reviewed hundreds of hate crime cases from over the past decade, and in many cases

defendants didn’t receive any jail time — even in some extreme encounters where

defendants beat victims, chased them with knives, metal pipes, crowbars and sticks or threatened to shoot them with guns.

In some of these cases, the only reason victims weren’t more seriously injured is because they ran faster than their attackers – or were able to fend them off. That’s true in the 2021 case of a guest at a Lincoln City hotel who disparaged the Asian American manager’s race and was captured on hotel surveillance video punching the manager 15 times, kneeing him in the groin and then running after him with a knife.

That’s also true in the 2022 case of a Latino family in The Dalles, whose members say they were able to wrestle away a machete from a drunken neighbor who launched into a racist and xenophobic rant as she charged at them with the weapon.

Though the neighbor disputes the events that led to her conviction, according to police reports and the family, the attack left them with bruises, bite marks and, for one of them, a head injury so debilitating she was unable to work for 10 days.

Victim Erika Alaniz said she was astonished that her attacker, 21-year-old Chasidy Brumfield, didn’t spend even one night in jail for The Dalles incident.

“It’s OK under the law, but no, it’s not OK,” said Alaniz. “This should have been more than probation. You attack someone? You try to kill them? The law needs to be changed.”

Others nationally are saying the same, as hate crimes have been climbing in Oregon and across the country nationwide in recent years.

Victims ask why Oregon law doesn’t require every hate-crime offender — from those who spit on others to those who vandalize property — to spend at least a few nights in jail. And what about offenders who throw punches or wield weapons, victims ask, shouldn’t Oregon sentencing guidelines send them to prison?

Experts who study hate crimes say incarcerating these offenders may reinforce their bigoted views because white supremacist prison gangs will likely welcome them with open arms. But those concerns also must be balanced with arguments that hate crimes are sometimes so violent and egregious that their perpetrators must be locked away for a long time.

“That’s the age-old argument: How best to punish?” said Randall Blazak, chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crimes.

The discourse goes far beyond punishment. Experts wonder: Is a justice system already overburdened by so many other crimes, including car thefts, fentanyl dealing and shootings, capable of more than just punishment for hate-crime offenders? Should it try to change their bigoted thinking through some sort of anti-bias education?

As it stands now, few options are available.

“It just becomes very frustrating for victims,” Blazak said.

DUII a model?

Gilliam County District Attorney Kara Davis said she’s worked with victims who are baffled that perpetrators of other crimes, such as drug dealing, might get 18 months in prison, but armed people who threatened to seriously injure or kill others because of their race or country of origin get probation, Davis said. Over the years, she has seen Oregon direct its efforts into beefing up its definition of a hate crime, but said the state has yet to focus on sentencing requirements.

“We say ‘We’ve created a separate group of crimes because we care so much about you, but we really can’t do much for you,” Davis said.

As part of her job in neighboring Wasco County, Davis prosecuted The Dalles neighbor who threatened the family with the machete. She said because there weren’t anger management or anti-bias education courses anywhere nearby, she ended up requiring that the neighbor take online courses as part of the plea agreement. She laments the lack of local, in-person options.

Davis also acted entirely on her own initiative – and not because of any requirements under Oregon law.

Experts who study hate crimes say future victims are less likely to report when they see defendants receive what they perceive as weak or ineffective sentences. Perhaps most of all, experts say, victims want their attackers to change.

“If you’re getting only probation as your punishment, is there incentive to change or are you going to do it again because all you’re going to get is a slap on the wrist?” asked Patrick Riccards, executive director of the nonprofit Life After Hate. The Wisconsin-based group — one of a very few in the nation that seeks to rewire the thinking of hate-crime offenders — spends 16 to 18 months with some, counseling them on how to work through their extreme views as part of a court-ordered sentence.

Adding to the complexities, many victims — especially those who aren’t white or middle class — may be unwilling to report hate crimes in the first place because they don’t feel safe calling police, said Joseph DeFilippis, an associate professor at Seattle University who studies hate-crime legislation.

He supports the concept of restorative justice programs, where perpetrators meet with representatives from targeted communities, victims or even their own family, friends and communities to learn about the harm they caused. The goal is to try to make amends through face-to-face conversations, apology letters, community service or monetary compensation.

“What we have found in multiple communities is that perpetrators do have a conscience, often,” DeFilippis said. “And when you bring in their family, their friends and their community, they don’t want to be ashamed like that. If your grandmother is sitting in the group saying ‘Tom, you spit on this woman and you need to make this right. …I’m embarrassed to be your grandmother.’ That’s very potent. That’s a better deterrent than prison.”

In rare cases over the past decade, prosecutors have sought restorative justice sentences or judges have assigned offenders to read anti-racism books and write essays as part of their probation. But sometimes probation requires little more than staying out of trouble with the law and refraining from contacting victims again.

Oregon’s approach to drunk driving could offer a model.

BJ Park, an Oregon deputy district attorney who has prosecuted scores of hate-crime offenders and more than anyone in the state, said he believes Oregon’s hate-crime sentencing laws could have much greater impact if they incorporated both punitive and rehabilitative requirements, much like the law has done — extensively — with DUIIs.

State law requires drivers who are convicted of DUII for the first time to be sentenced to a minimum of two days in jail or 80 hours of community service, a $1,000 fine, substance abuse evaluations, substance abuse treatment if deemed necessary, a one-year driver’s license suspension and the installation of an ignition interlock device after the suspension is up. Many intoxicated drivers are allowed to avoid a conviction upon their first arrest, but they still need to fulfill some of those requirements.

State statute also grants judges the option of sentencing intoxicated drivers to an educational component — known as “victim impact panels” — which involve sitting through face-to-face sessions with victims of impaired drivers, including people whose loved ones have been killed, and listening to how DUII drivers shattered their lives.

“Why can we not have that for bias crimes?” said Park, who now prosecutes hate crimes as a Marion County deputy district attorney.

Some states already have taken steps toward that goal. Connecticut fines hate-crime offenders a minimum of $1,000 and has written anti-bias education options into state law. New York state became one of the first in the nation in 2022 to require hate crime prevention education for all hate-crime offenders.

Oregon Department of Justice officials say they’ve had internal discussions about trying to replicate the success of Oregon’s DUII sentencing laws with hate crimes. But it may be 2025 before they present any proposals to state legislators.

Officials in Washington and Multnomah counties, too, say they’re in early discussions about creating county-level “sentencing packages” for hate-crime offenders.

‘Hurt us’

Victims, meanwhile, are waiting.

Castro Gomez and Marroquin, the Beaverton couple, said they were sure the neighbor who pointed the gun at them and their children as he yelled for them to return to their home country would go to prison because of the appalling nature of the crime. But prison was never on the table. The prosecution agreed to drop its pursuit of the hate-crime charge and allow the neighbor to be sentenced on other charges. That’s partially because a hate-crime conviction wouldn’t affect the length of his sentence: Oregon’s hate-crime sentencing laws only require probation.

Castro Gomez and Marroquin felt terrified about what might happen if they came across their former neighbor, whom they worried had no court interventions that might have helped him change his ways. Marroquin’s concerns persisted when she said Castro Gomez was deported back to Guatemala this fall and she continued to live in their Beaverton apartment with their children. Marroquin said she has been allowed to stay in the U.S. because she has an asylum case pending.

The Oregonian sifted through the court file and learned that their former neighbor, Coble, moved out of state to Colorado — more than 1,000 miles away — over a year ago. But Marroquin, through a Spanish interpreter, said no one in the court system ever told her or her husband that.

This new information —and not anything Oregon’s sentencing law did — offered some comfort.

“Now,” she said, “we’re not worried he’s going to hurt us.”