For people all about kindness to animals, the Santa Cruz eco-terrorist community is pretty unkind to their fellow homo sapiens:

…Santa Cruz police released more details about Sunday’s attack. Escalante said the UCSC’s researcher’s husband heard yelling in the front yard, looked out the front door window and saw protesters about 12:50 p.m.

At the time, the family was celebrating a birthday party for one of their children. Their two children and two others, all under the age of 10, were inside. They moved the kids to the back of the house and the wife stayed with them.

“By that time he hears pounding,” Escalante said. The man returned to the front door, locked the dead bolt, checked on the kids and went back to the door. “He can see the [door] frame moving.”

At some point, someone from the home dialed 911 but didn’t speak.

“It was an open line with some sort of disturbance,” Escalante said. “There was a woman screaming in the background and children crying.”

Police were dispatched to the address associated with the phone number. Meanwhile, the man opened the front door and confronted the protesters.

He was hit on the hand once or twice by an unknown object, and fought back throwing a punch or two, according to police.

“He defended himself after being attacked,” Escalante said. “He started in the doorway by trying to push the people back, then moved back out onto the lawn area.”

They’re being cagey about the organizations involved, but between that story and this story they seem to have a pretty good idea of where to look for the suspects, and there are indications it’s a statewide cell with links in SoCal as well. And in case you think this is a tiny unrepresentative sample of youth today, look at how the crowd behaved when the cops went to serve a search warrant:

Several UCSC students gathered around the house early Sunday afternoon while police were waiting for the search warrant. Some wore bandannas to cover their faces.

The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office helped police secure the area as the crowd grew to more than 70, Escalante said.

While the search was taking place, protesters taunted officers, asking them to reveal their badge numbers and shining flashlights in their eyes. When officers emerged from the house carrying evidence, some of the students were following the police, taking pictures of the undercover squad car and its license plates with their cell phones.

It’s not surprising to me–the first story reports a series of a half-dozen incidents of vandalism against UCSC researchers, and there’s a long tradition of low-level terror around Santa Cruz. Lovely little town.