Lompoc City Hall Critic Beaten

A Lompoc man and frequent City Hall critic is recovering from a recent beating he took inside his business.

73 year old Ray Leslie shows the bruises and stitches he got from what he says was a brutal beating he suffered inside his Ocean Avenue motorcycle store during a recent dispute with his younger business partner.

“I let him just take it over, just walk into a business and start in and get everything going”, Leslie says about his business arrangment with his partner, “what I told him he could do is he could have the building with no charge until he got going but he had to pay the utilities because he would be using them, and pay for the parts that he bought, but I wasn’t going to charge him on top of that.”

“So he mainly he got the building for free he just had to pay for all the maintenance and everything to go along with the building to do it”, Leslie says.

Leslie claims his business partner racked up about $20,000 in debt and he met with him and his father recently inside the Ocean Avenue store to resolve the matter.

“I just turned around, I was looking outside, I turned around and his dad hit me in the head with this crowbar”, Leslie says, “I don’t know how I stayed awake, they were real brutal, blood was squirting everywhere.”

Leslie says he managed to stop the beating by holding onto the crowbar when Lompoc Police arrived and restored order.

“So next thing I hear is the officer saying that they are going to arrest me also for assault”, Leslie says, “so I said, Officer, there’s a not a scratch on them two guys, that doesn’t make any difference, its still, you still could have assaulted them.”

“I said, how, look what they did to me, this is an assault”, Leslie says, “they said well we gotta take you to the hospital because you lost a lot of blood, we’re going to have to charge you though, so they handcuffed me and put me in an ambulance.”

Leslie says he was eventually booked into the Lompoc Jail and charged with assault.

Lompoc Police say they investigated the case involving Ray Leslie and his business partner as a “mutual combat assault” involving two parties and recommended the District Attorney’s Office file assault charges against Leslie and his alleged attackers.

Leslie says he’s not sure if his ordeal is linked in anyway to his outspoken criticism of Lompoc City Hall and the Lompoc City Council.

“It just seemed like they went out of their way to really make my life difficult and I did nothing wrong”, Leslie says, “I used to get along with the city really good, and I thought I still did, I thought I got along with the Police Department okay, but they treated me like dirt, like second-hand dirt.”