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We have an early contender for mug shot of the year award from a self-avowed skinhead.Jonathan Schmidt, 29, was arrested on suspicion of attacking several people at a Lake Elsinore bar with a knife late on Sunday night, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. One man said Schmidt attacked him when he tried to break up a fight. Police said they discovered more victims in the bar during their investigation, though none of the knife wounds were life-threatening. Police arrested Schmidt on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon after he left the bar in his Ford Explorer. They found a knife on him.
Those face tattoos should make it pretty easy to pick Schmidt out of line-up—in fact, they have before. Schmidt was accused of stomping on a man and fracturing his skull in Kearney, Nebraska last year. Schmidt admitted to hitting the victim once in a face during a fight, but a jury ultimately acquitted him of the charges.
While Schmidt was in Kearney, he went by the name "Monster" and founded a white supremacist gang called Crew 41. Southern Poverty Law Center describes the group as a "pop-up gang" organized online with chapters around the country, including South Carolina and Denver. Schmidt founded the group after quitting his position on the Aryan Terror Brigade, where he was dogged by accusations that he was a police informant. South Carolina Crew 41 members Jeremy Moody and his wife Christine were accused of killing a man who was on a sex offender registry list. (For what it's worth, all of the victims here were white.)
As for those tattoos? It looks like a lot of them are connected to Schmidt's skinhead/neo-Nazi/white supremacist ties. Those S's on the right side of his head look like the SS symbol. The runes on his left eyebrow spell "hate," SPLC says. 5150 is a reference to an involuntary psychiatric hold, and FYL means "fuck your life." There are full-body pictures of Schmidt here and here, too. He's got a swastika on his solar plexus and Odin's Cross within the swastika and on his arm. And there's a whole lot more where that came from. But it looks like Schmidt has a new lady in his life: the "Evelyn" tattoo above his lips is new.
