STEVEN HOLTEN ON FORMER ROOMMATE DAREN ABBEY: 'WE FORGED A GREAT FRIENDSHIP'

Well, it is interesting how small the neo-Nazi scene can be, especially out West. You know that bonehead everyone is laughing at these days, Daren Abbey, who got his bonehead broken by a African American boxer he decided to harass? We are learning some things about him and the life he led, thanks to his former roomie, former Aryan Nations member Steven Holten. Holten has had his share of ups and downs in the WP scene, a lot of it due to his HIV positive status, but also because of his arrests over the past two years. He wanted to let the public know what kind of person Abbey is and we were all ears when we read his emails about the close friendship they both shared. Truth be told, Daren Abbey was a nobody that just became even more of a joke when he was knocked out cold by a black man last week. Then comes this. We assure you, this is something to read!

One People’s Project

Daren C. Abbey came into noteriety rather quickly, thanks to him picking a fight with the wrong man. On July 3, he, in a drunken state confronted a black man in a Bayview, ID bar, telling him that blacks were not welcome there. The man, 46-year-old Marlon Baker and his friends didn’t want any trouble, so they left  Abbey followed him, and moments later he was out cold, thanks to a right hook by Baker, who was wearing a T-Shirt at the time that read “Howard Street Boxing Club”.

Abbey is currently still sitting in the Kootenai County Jail, charged with battery and felony malicious harassment, in lieu of $75,000 bail.  Over the weekend, after the Southern Poverty Law Center posted the story on their blog on July 8, Abbey became the object of ridicule all over the internet and on news programs, complete with his mugshot of his bandaged face going viral on Facebook and assorted blogs. The discussion board for the website dreamindemon.com has a thread on the story titled “Skinhead Daren Abbey Has A Reading Problem And A Well Deserved Mugshot”, while the blog truecrimereport.com wrote, “28-year-old Daren C. Abbey is another one of those white supremacists doing his best to disabuse you of the notion of whitey’s supremacy.”

That might be truer than one knows. More is being learned about Abbey and his life in the White Power scene, particularly his friendship with Aryan Nations member Steven Holten, who says Abbey and him roomed together seven years ago in Reno, Nevada. Today that relationship, which Holten at times refered to as an “awkward intamancy”, is completely nonexistant, which after it was disclosed that he was HIV positive was such that Holten believes one will kill the other if they ever saw each other again.

According to Holten, Abbey is, despite initial reports that he is from Sacramento, CA, a native of Reno and a transient who never held a full-time job and has been in and out of trouble with the law all of his life, often for fighting. He and his twin brother Dustin are always together, and Holten suspects Dustin with there in that Bayview bar when his brother was knocked out. Abbey also has this obsession with the outdoors and is an avid hunter and fisherman. Living in Idaho is ideal to him, as Holten explains he doesn’t do well in cities. Abbey’s parents are divorced with his father living in Sacramento and his mother still in Reno. She doesn’t have any associations with either of her sons, possibly due to her professional work with top officials in Reno including the mayor, and her Facebook page doesn’t even note she has any children.

“I first had met Daren Abbey when I moved to Reno in 2001 through a skinhead who was involved with Matt Hale’s (World Church of the) Creator group,” Holten said in an email. “Daren had then went back to prison, and we corresponded for months, until he was released, then we forged a great friendship based on skinhead connections and interests.”

Steven Holten is on Daren Abbey’s left wearing the Aryan Nations shirt, while his twin brother Dustin is on his right wearing the black Iron Cross shirt. The other two adults in the pic were Aryan Nations recruits who later became members.

In December 2003, Abbey’s mother kicked him out of her home in Reno, and a month later Holten took him in because he had nowhere else to go, despite not having a job or any income to cover the bills. Although Holten was a leader in Aryan Nations at the time, Abbey never joined the group, preferring instead to practice Odinism. Despite his religious affiliation, he still remained a supporter of Aryan Nations, although because of a lack of money he didn’t go with Holten to the Aryan Nations parade in Idaho on July 19, 2004, which was the last one before Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler died a month and a half later. Holten and Abbey were thick as thieves, and had a relationship that Holten called “more of an aggressive type intamacy that was non-committal”, and that went on until Sept. 2004 when the FBI raided their apartment, leading to Holten’s eventual imprisonment for sending out mass e-mails that promised murder and mayhem to minorities, gays and anyone against the “white power” movement.

It was during this arrest that it was revealed that Holten was HIV positive, a fact that he had never disclosed before and could have meant Holten’s life at the hands of his collegues, including Abbey. After the apartment was raided, Holten says Abbey decided to hit the road. “He went to Oregon in a truck that I sold him, he got a girl pregnant, she had a miscarriage or abortion, then he came back to Reno,” he wrote.

As luck would have it, they would both end up in the same prison together on unrelated charges, and in the same protective custody section of that prison, and that’s when Abbey learned of his HIV status. “He was in the same tier, like four rooms down from my door, but seperated by a wall and he at that time had found out…and that’s what basically put him on the rampage to kill me,” Holten said. “Basically if I ran into Daren now here in town I would shoot first and ask questions later.”

This would be the last time Holten would see Abbey, who over the next few years continue his life as a drifter, getting himself in trouble with the law, as Holten said he did in 2009 when he attacked a police officer in Phoenix, AZ, netting him a year there. Holten has had a rough few years himself. He pled guilty to a 2006 charge of indecent exposure, and in 2009 was caught up in a Sparks, NV sex sting operation, where he eventually pled guilty to a disturbing the peace charge. He is currently under house arrest on a DUI charge, also in 2009, which he was to have satisfied on Tuesday. “I have not been able to fulfill my 48 hours of comm(unity) service for the DUI,” he wrote. “(I) cannot even pick up dog poop because my skinhead tats scare people. So this weekend, I was put on HOUSE ARREST for 96 hours, to fulfill that DUI stuff.”

Holten maintains th
at during his arrest for the DUI, in which his passenger was Jason Karr of the white power crew Public Eneny Number One (PEN1), who is currently incarcerated in the Orange County (CA) Jail on three charges, the arresting officer broke his arm, costing him $100,000 in medical bills. He has expressed intentions to sue for those costs. The past sex sting arrest also still angers him, as he contends he was being set up for a fall by the Sparks police. He has written a letter that among other things, charges the police department with entrapment, saying that ‘If I have any contact with Sparks P.D. in the future that results in a false arrest, harassment, inappropriate questioning about my past or present affiliations, I will sue the Department and the personnel involved.”

As for Abbey, he says he is not surprised he ended up in the situation he is in, given his brawler reputation. “For that knockout, he’s knocked out two or three hundred people and got away with it, but this time he didn’t.”