A former couple is sentenced for a violent, racist attack on a Black man outside the Monterey Lanes bowling alley.

Dirrick Williams walked to the front of the courtroom and pulled down his mask so everyone could hear him clearly as he spoke at the sentencing of the two people who had upended his life. 

An Air Force veteran, writer and community activist, Williams had gone to the Monterey Lanes bowling alley on July 6, 2018, to collect entry forms and fees for an annual golf and bowling tournament he ran to benefit The Village Project, the Seaside-based youth services nonprofit where Williams is a longtime board member.

As he was leaving to go to his car, he came across the path of Noah and Tricia Boewer—and the Boewers, who had been drinking at the bar inside the bowling alley, were looking for a fight. After hurling the N-word at him, and after Tricia Boewer falsely claimed Williams had deliberately grabbed her behind as he walked past her, they got what they were looking for.

As Williams turned to ask why they had used that word, Noah Boewer punched Williams in the face, breaking his jaw in three places, and Tricia Boewer jumped on his back. Both hurled the racist epithet at him the entire time.

In December, a jury found Noah Boewer guilty of felony assault and Tricia Boewer of misdemeanor battery, but found both not guilty of a hate crime. And for the first time, at the Jan. 20 sentencing hearing of the former couple, Williams explained to Monterey County Superior Court Judge Andrew Liu the brief history of what it's like to exist as a Black man in America.

"The lie Tricia Boewer told to the police and this court when she said I physically accosted her is more than a lie, more than an insult. It was a direct and deliberate attack on my life," Williams said. "The court wants to know the impact she has in my life? Well, after calling me a nigger several times, she employed the oldest trick in the book when it comes to interactions between white women and Black men.

"A white woman lies," he said, "and by the thousands black lives are devastated…she lied and she did so with the deliberate intent of destroying my life. Witness and police reports indicate with her, black lives do not matter. This was a violent attack on my life as I know it. I cannot believe this woman, whose mouth began this problem, whose lie elevated this problem, who adversely perpetuated this problem into the lives of so many people, is walking away from this court not being held accountable to depth of which her evil demands."

Had she succeeded with her lie, Williams added, life as he knew it would have ended and everything he had worked to accomplish would have come to a crashing halt.

And Noah Boewer, he said, was a textbook example of white rage. 

"In every case where a white woman accused a Black man of anything, white men…have burned, beat, hung, castrated, shot, killed and broke the jaw and the backs of countless Black men, and Black families, and have done so at will," Williams said.

But while the Monterey County Probation Department had recommended both Boewers be placed on probation for their crimes, Liu decided otherwise when it came to the issue of holding the Boewers accountable. 

He sentenced Noah Boewer to six years in prison, and Tricia Boewer to 60 days in jail—a remarkable sentence for a misdemeanor battery conviction—and had the bailiff put her in handcuffs and take her into immediate custody.

Noah Boewer, already in custody and awaiting trial in San Benito County for a 2020 assault on Tricia Boewer that put her into the hospital, was transported back to the jail.

In his comments before sentencing, Liu told Williams, "You have been heard by this court." He pointed out that the jury rejected the defendants claims of self defense, and that not too much should be read into the jury not finding the couple guilty of a hate crime, because proving a hate crime is a high hurdle.

"I cannot say I personally understand the experiences you describe, but they are also not foreign to me," Liu said. "The phrase that has repeatedly come to mind as I thought about this case...is that the march toward justice does not move in a straight line, but it does move forward.

"I think perhaps too often we think of racism in stark terms. It is not simply or merely a hatred of people of color or other groups. Everyday racism takes on varying forms with varying degrees of subtlety," Liu said. He added that he took into account witness testimony that Noah Boewer had verbally accosted a pair of Indian men at the bar, with Tricia Boewer egging him on, and that both made profligate use of the N-word during the attack. 

"That particular word is just not the sort of thing that rolls off the tongue. It is not easily uttered, it pains most people to hear it, it is even more difficult to get that word to leave one's lips." Liu said. "It is simply not the first word someone reaches for even in the heat of an altercation unless using such language is a part of who that person is."

He noted the physical injury to Williams was significant, as was the injury done to society on that day. He called Tricia Boewer defiant, unremorseful, superior and entitled in portraying herself as a victim using a "tired old trope" and added that she continues to maintain an unbelievable lie.

After she serves the 60 days in jail, Tricia Boewer will remain on formal probation for a year. She filed for divorce from Noah Boewer in December, after their convictions and about six weeks after Noah Boewer assaulted her.