Riverside County officials on Thursday confirmed what a white supremacist website and brief newspaper obituary said Tuesday — that notorious former Klan leader Tom Metzger is dead.
News of the one-time Fallbrook resident’s passing went viral, but some media outlets — including The Associated Press — hesitated to distribute a story for lack of more solid evidence.
(The AP posted a story about 2:45 p.m. Thursday. The New York Times followed two hours later.)
Metzger, 82, died Nov. 4 of Parkinson’s disease at a skilled nursing facility in Hemet, according to Jose Arballo Jr., a spokesman for Riverside County’s health agency.
“His residence was in San Jacinto (which neighbors Hemet),” Arballo told Times of San Diego via email.
Metzger’s death certificate has not been registered yet, he added, but would probably be made available this week.
“They have what they call a working copy of the death certificate,” Arballo said, noting a public health officer hasn’t signed off on it.
The San Diego Union-Tribune ran a four-sentence paid obituary for Metzger, and a U-T source said
the paper’s obituary department confirms deaths with mortuaries before printing notices.
Arballo said Metzger died at ManorCare Health Services in Hemet. A spokeswoman at ManorCare corporate offices in Toledo, Ohio, declined to give more information, citing patient privacy laws.
As it turns out, Arballo once met Metzger.
“When I was a journalism student at San Diego State University, he came out to speak to us when he was running for Congress [in 1980], and I was able to follow him around while he was speaking and actually follow him to his limo,” Arballo said in a phone interview.
Arballo — a Chula Vista native who later spent 27 years as a reporter at the Press-Enterprise in Riverside — didn’t accept Metzger’s invitation to join other media members in the car as it drove away.
“He was kind of shunted off campus,” he said.
Updated at 5:13 p.m. Nov. 12, 2020
