SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — The brother of Ashli Babbitt the San Diego woman fatally shot during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, has been convicted after he assaulted and hurled racial slurs at an SDG&E worker in Point Loma Heights.
San Diego City Attorney Mara W. Elliott announced Wednesday, 33-year-old Roger Stefan Witthoeft Jr. was convicted of all charges including a hate crime, for allegedly slapping a Latino worker last year and telling him to “talk in English you (expletive) immigrant” and “go back to your country.”
Prosecutors say, in Sept. 2021 the worker was diverting traffic at a Point Loma intersection where SDG&E workers were repairing a utility box, causing Witthoeft to become “enraged” because the worker’s truck was stopped in the intersection.
Sometime around January 2022 – about four months after attacking the SDG&E employee – Witthoeft faced new criminal charges after getting into an altercation with another man on Muir Avenue in Ocean Beach. In that attack, Witthoeft allegedly knocked a man to the ground and stomped on his phone after becoming angry with the victim for blocking a sidewalk with his vehicle. At the time, the victim was helping a disabled friend out of the car, according to the City Attorney’s office.
Witthoeft was previously convicted of vandalism for a 2016 confrontation with a 71-year-old Latino man in Lakeside. The victim asked Witthoeft to move his pickup truck. Witthoeft came up to the victim’s truck, screaming, kicked the man’s door, and kicked a window out of his camper shell.
