Tom Metzger, white supremacist who lived in Fallbrook for 4 decades, dies at 82

Tom Metzger, the white supremacist who lived in Fallbrook for decades, died earlier this month.

According to Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance webpage, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard died Nov. 4 in Hemet at the age of 82.

A short obituary to Metzger that ran in the San Diego Union-Tribune Nov. 10 stated he lived in Fallbrook for 40 years; he worked as a television repairman during his time in town. Metzger later returned to his hometown in Indiana, then came back to California in the years before his death, according to his obituary, which said his family will be having a “private gathering.”

“He is survived by Mary Arnold, six children – Carolyn, Dorraine, John, Lynn, Rebecca, Laurie along with nine grandchildren and one great- grandchild,” the obituary said. “Tom served in the U.S. Army as a PFC-E1 from 1956 to 1959 and then moved to Southern California to work in the electronics industry.”

The obituary leaves out his Ku Klux Klan affiliation and his runs for public office.

Metzger won a Democratic primary for California’s 43rd Congressional District in 1980, leading Democratic leaders to disavow him and endorse his opponent, incumbent Clair Burgener.

Metzger also ran in a Democratic primary in for United States Senate in California two years later in 1982, earning about 76,000 votes, though Jerry Brown won that primary with more than one million votes.

He later ran for a congressional seat in Indiana in 2010, earning just 10 votes.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has called Metzger a neo-Nazi and once described him as a “wily, iconic racist ideologue who has for years espoused “lone-wolf” terrorism.”

According to the SPLC, Metzger was jailed in Los Angeles in 1991 for 45 days out of a six month sentence in connection with a cross burning he attended nine years earlier in 1982. He was also jailed for violating Canadian immigration laws in 1992 by entering the country “to promote race hatred” and had his home searched in 2009 “in connection with the arrest of two brothers accused of carrying out a mail bomb attack that injured an Arizona diversity director.”