Before the Saturday morning attack, [Fernando] Ramirez had already spent months behind bars.
On Jan. 10, 2020, he was sentenced to four years in prison after a jury found him guilty of battery with serious injury, violation of civil rights and a hate crime enhancement for attacking a Black Whole Foods employee.
[He] was 23 when, on June 15, 2019, he entered a Whole Foods Market in Laguna Beach and sucker-punched a 26-year-old Black employee who’d been on a lunch break, breaking the man’s nose and severely damaging his two front teeth, according to reports at the time of the incident.
When asked by an officer why he did it, Ramirez said in a conversation recorded on video that it was, in part, because the worker was Black, and that “he hated all Black people,” court records show.