KEN MIESKE, ROT IN HELL!

Boneheads usually cry about our “Rot in Hell” sendoffs, but this time around we would be surpised if the antifa crew in Portland didn’t make T-Shirts for this one (and we will hype them up on this site if they do)! Ken “Death” Mieske was a member of a bonehead crew from that town called East Side White Pride, which was affiliated with Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (WAR). In 1988,  he and his crew beat an Ethiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw to death, with Mieske delivering the killing blow with a baseball bat. He was sentenced to life for the murder, but that wasn’t all that happened. Because his crew was associated with WAR, that made WAR liable and the Southern Poverty Law Center was able to get a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Tom Metzger and his son John, neutrializing Tom and making him a shell of his former self, and sending John into such an obscurity no one has heard from him for more than a decade. The Seraw killing was the spark that ignited the antifa scene in Portland, and to this day it is one of the strongest and most dedicated in the country. Meanwhile the man responsible for that killing has been denied a long life, which pretty much makes all that has happened in the aftermath of Seraw’s death that much sweeter!

Oregon Live

Ken Mieske — who in 1988 perpetrated Portland’s most notorious hate crime, the beating death of Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw — has died.

The Oregon Department of Corrections confirmed this morning that Mieske, an inmate since 1989, died on Tuesday at Salem Hospital at 4:30 p.m.

Mieske, 45, had long suffered from hepatitis C, according to those familiar with his treatment for the disease. Prison officials declined to comment on his cause of death.

On Nov. 13, 1988, Mieske and two other members of a skinhead gang called East Side White Pride attacked a group of Ethiopian men in Southeast Portland after a traffic altercation.

Mieske, known as “Ken Death” during his days as a death metal rock musician, took a Louisville Slugger baseball bat and beat Mulugeta Seraw to death.

The Seraw murder stunned Portland, but it shouldn’t have.

Racist skinheads began to roost in the city in about 1985, even as white supremacists grew in number across Oregon, Washington and Idaho — robbing banks, assaulting and killing minorities and trying to spark a race revolution.

On the night of Nov. 12, 1988, Mieske and two other Skinheads, Kyle Brewster and Steve Strasser, spotted Seraw as he stood outside a countryman’s Oldsmobile, parked in the middle of the narrow side street where he lived.

The skinheads screamed at the Africans to move before attacking with boots and a baseball bat.

Brewster was punching Seraw when Mieske moved behind and struck the African twice on the head with the bat. Seraw fell bleeding on the cold pavement when Mieske took a final swing.

“It crushed his head between the bat and the hard pavement,” said Portland police Detective Sgt. Tom Nelson, a key detective in the case.

All three of the skinheads were arrested and later pleaded guilty to murder, assault, and racial intimidation. In a 1990 subsequent civil suit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a jury returned a $12.5 million verdict against Metzger — a record judgment for a U.S. racism case at the time.

Mieske was serving a life sentence for murder at the Oregon State Penitentiary before he died, said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Tonya Sly.

Many years after Mieske’s incarceration, white power groups still referred to him as a “prisoner of war.”

The killing of Seraw was a story carried worldwide and gave notoriety to Portland as a haven for racist skinhead groups. A major civil rights organization dubbed the town “Skinhead City.”