Racism was no stranger to stabbing victim

Proud of his Mexican heritage, Bernal wouldn't let someone degrade him

Jessica VanEgeren  —  9/17/2008 7:30 am

For a few hours, there was hope.

In the early morning hours of Sept. 4, JoAnn Bernal thought that her son, 22-year-old Juan Jose Bernal, would rebound from the stab wounds he had sustained the previous night.

He was a fighter, she told herself, a black belt in karate, a tough kid who seldom let people get the best of him. Her confidence in his recovery was strengthened when she watched the doctors and nurses wheel him back into the hospital room after surgery. He had an IV in his arm, pumping a saline solution into his body for hydration. With no other tubes, breathing devices or life-stabilizing apparatus attached to her son, JoAnn thought he was in the clear.

"I told him I loved him, that he was strong, and that he could lick this," JoAnn said.

After a night in the hospital, her son never regained consciousness. She watched helplessly as her only child -- who had dreamed about becoming a police officer like his father, a karate teacher or a fictitious ninja turtle -- was pronounced dead a little after 8 a.m.

"I had hope," she said. "I really thought he was going to pull through."

The events that brought her son's life to a violent end had unraveled the night before when Bernal and a group of his friends walked into a popular bar off State Street. Known for its world-famous Plaza burgers and visited by the likes of Bill Murray, Johnny Cash, Neil Young and Brett Favre, the Plaza Tavern is not the kind of place parents would shy away from taking their kids for a bite to eat.

Yet before midnight on Sept. 3, a fight between Bernal, his friends and two other bar patrons broke out when the men objected to the rap music selections Bernal and his friends had made on the jukebox, according to prosecutors. Words later were exchanged as Bernal was walking back into the bar after smoking a cigarette outside. Fists started to fly, and Bernal put his alleged killer into a headlock, punching him several times in the face. Shortly after Bernal pulled away, he fell on his back on the sidewalk in front of the bar, stab wounds visible on his chest.

It wasn't the first time Bernal found himself in a bar fight. Three years earlier, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges after throwing a pool cue and a bottle at a bartender in a Stoughton Road bar after another patron punched the bartender when told it was time to leave.

The fight earlier this month was different, erupting over what the Madison native had heard many times before: racially charged words aimed at his ethnicity or the ethnicity of his friends. Of Mexican-American descent, Juan was slender, with green eyes and short, dark hair. At times, he wore baggy jeans and oversized T-shirts. He listened to rap music. During his life, his family says, strangers would focus on the negative stereotypes associated with that kind of music or people who dressed that way. It was something Juan had grown accustomed to hearing, but not something that he would hear on the night of his death and brush aside.

"This is an absolutely horrible thing to have happened," said Kallie Waite, a close friend of Juan's and the mother of their 3-year-old son, Kian. "This could have happened to anybody ... anybody standing up for their race."

"He was proud of his Mexican heritage." It's a short, simple sentence included in his obituary that defined how Juan's family knew their son felt about himself. But that perceived pride didn't make facing other people's ignorance and prejudices any easier.

Sitting on her couch more than a week after her son's death, JoAnn flipped through a box of family photos and talked about a time her eyes and her vocabulary were expanded because of her son's ethnicity.

On the sidewalk in front of their house, someone had spray painted swastikas and the word "spic." Remembering that day, she said she knew people used different words to describe people of different backgrounds, but had never seen or heard that slur used for Mexican-Americans. She said she had to ask Juan what it meant. An eighth-grader at Abundant Life Christian School at the time, he knew the word.

"I was flabbergasted when I saw it," JoAnn said. "I couldn't believe somebody could do that. I was completely shocked."

She said the family never found out who did it or why. She only speculated that Juan must have made somebody mad.

At school, fellow students could be as disparaging. Some white students called him names because he wasn't "white enough," while some Latino students felt he wasn't "Latino enough," Waite said. She said she remembers being in restaurants with Juan and overhearing parents, some accompanied by their children, making offensive comments about Juan's race.

"It was extremely upsetting to him," Waite said. "He tried to brush it off and keep his cool, but it bothered him. I saw how hurt he was. It was hard for him to deal with."

Waite said she would never have believed that these sorts of things were still happening, had it not been for her relationship with Juan. Although the two were currently not dating, they remained friends and either saw one another or spoke every week. Waite said Kian was a bond between them. Having a child at a young age isn't easy, she said, and it was the financial difficulties, not the couple's feelings for each other, that eventually broke them up a year after Kian's birth.

"We always thought we would get back together," Waite said. "We were still close. When he died, my parents told me they felt like they had lost a son."

She sounded like a love-struck teenager as she recalled the first time she saw Juan during a pep rally her sophomore year at La Follette High School.

"It was his green eyes and his complexion," she said. "I just thought he was beautiful."

She said their son, who turns 4 in October, is the spitting image of his father.

"Everything is Juan, from his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his grin and his goofy faces -- even his walk and his stance," Waite said. "He will do anything to make people happy, which is exactly like Juan" was.

Juan, along with his father, Bernardo Bernal, would visit relatives as far away as Italy, Venezuela and Mexico. Bernardo spoke during his son's funeral service last week, at which time he said his son had an appreciation and love for people of all races and ethnicity. Juan's father, a former Madison police officer who now lives in Texas, said the same couldn't be said for the men involved in his son's death. Last week, Justin Stout, 31, was charged with first-degree reckless homicide, and Travis Knapp, 34, was charged with aiding a felon and felony bail jumping.

"Juan loved everyone," Bernardo told the crowd of roughly 250. "That is evident by those here tonight."

The violent nature of his death and the thought that some of the last words he heard while still conscious were hate words makes his passing all the more difficult to handle, JoAnn said. To get past it, the family is focusing on the good times they had together.

A favorite family story that has been retold numerous times since Juan's death centers around one of many fishing outings Juan took with his grandfather. JoAnn's dad had been lucky on this given day, pulling fish after fish from the water. Each time he pulled in his line to remove a fish, Juan, only 7 or 8 at the time, would jump in and put his line in the same spot. Juan's fishing pole and tackle box now belong to his grandfather.

"He was very loving," his mother said. "He was the kind of kid who would give his last sucker to a friend."

As she walked down the steps toward the front door, she paused to look at a framed self-portrait Juan had etched in pencil in high school. Across from it hangs another framed piece of artwork that was entered in an art fair. Next to it is the first framed drawing from Kian. He is artistic, just like his father.

The youngster still has questions about what has happened to his dad and why he's in a place that he can't visit. The other question he asked, Waite said, was whether his dad was sharing his toys with anyone in Heaven.

jvanegeren@madison.com

Jessica VanEgeren  —  9/17/2008 7:30 am