The conviction of Gerald Pitts follows a county report showing hate crimes remained near record levels across Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — The life sentence imposed on a man who stabbed a Latino stranger during a racially motivated attack on a Metro bus comes amid persistently high hate crime numbers across Los Angeles County, where officials recorded 1,355 reported cases in 2024.
Gerald Pitts, 67, was sentenced Thursday to life plus seven years in state prison with the possibility of parole. A jury convicted him June 16 of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon and found several special allegations true, including that he committed a hate crime and caused great bodily injury.
The March 2023 attack began after Santos Tejas Gonzalez boarded a Los Angeles Metro bus and attempted to walk past Pitts to take a seat, according to prosecutors. Pitts began shouting racial slurs at Gonzalez, who tried to avoid the confrontation by leaving the bus in Exposition Park near Western Avenue and Exposition Boulevard.
Prosecutors said Pitts then used a knife to repeatedly stab Gonzalez. After Gonzalez fell from the bus onto the pavement, Pitts continued the assault while directing racial slurs at him, according to the district attorney’s office. Gonzalez suffered injuries that authorities described as life-threatening.
The case provides a stark example of the type of bias-motivated violence tracked each year by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations. Its latest annual report, covering 2024, documented 1,355 reported hate crimes countywide. That was a 1% decline from the record 1,367 cases recorded in 2023, but it remained the second-highest total in the report’s 44-year history.
Race, ethnicity and national origin accounted for 48% of reported hate crimes in 2024, making that category the most common motivation identified by the commission. The county recorded 678 victims in that category, the highest number in the commission’s current database.
Anti-Latino crimes declined slightly from 145 in 2023 to 143 in 2024, but the 2024 figure was still the second-highest recorded in the annual report. Other groups also experienced historically high levels of reported targeting, underscoring that the county’s overall decline from the previous year was small.
The commission reported 345 anti-Black crimes in 2024, the highest number it had recorded, while anti-transgender crimes reached 102. The report also documented record or near-record levels involving several religious, ethnic and other groups. County officials have cautioned that the figures reflect reported hate crimes and therefore measure incidents known to authorities and participating organizations.
Against that broader backdrop, prosecutors characterized the attack on Gonzalez as violence intended not only to harm an individual but also rooted in hostility toward a person’s race or perceived race. District Attorney Nathan Hochman said after Pitts’ sentencing that hate crime laws are intended to address violence that can intimidate wider communities as well as individual victims.
The setting of the attack also placed the violence in a shared public space used daily by riders across Los Angeles. Gonzalez had simply boarded the bus and attempted to take a seat when the confrontation began, prosecutors said. There was no indication in the available account that he and Pitts knew each other before the attack.
The jury’s findings meant the bias motivation was established as part of the verdict rather than remaining only an allegation from prosecutors. Pitts’ sentence of life plus seven years with the possibility of parole closes the trial and sentencing phase of the case more than three years after the attack.
Author note: Last updated August 7, 2026.