Editor’s Note: There is much to report about the Santana Row case and the ongoing bias against the Assyrian-American defendants by the Santa Clara District Attorney, prominent elected officials, and local media. This article, focusing on the arraignment, serves as a brief introduction to the case, and the little-acknowledged but long-standing Assyrian Christian community in California. A full breakdown of the many biases and inconsistencies contained in the police report is planned for next week.
Back-to-Back Defeats for Santa Clara DA Jeff Rosen:
On May 13, Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen, one of the more provocative members of the Bay Area’s Jewish Community Relations Council’s “Bay Area Network of Jewish Officials”, suffered a humiliating defeat in court.
It was the second defeat in only six days.
Less than a week earlier, on May 7, Judge Kelley Paul, citing a conflict of interest, had ordered Rosen be recused from retrying a case against “the Stanford 12”. That case involved a group of 12 students and allies who had occupied the Stanford University President’s office in June of 2024 to protest Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The conflict of interest was created by Rosen’s insistence on weaponizing his unusually harsh charges against the Stanford 12 to raise money for his re-election campaign.
A Second Defeat for DA Rosen’s Office: Judge Denies Protective Criminal Restraining Order Against The Santana Row Defendants
Six days later, on May 13, Rosen’s office suffered another humiliation when Judge Hector E. Ramon refused to grant Rosen’s prosecutors a protective criminal restraining order against the defendants in the March 8 Santana Row incident. In that case, three young American men, all of Assyrian Christian background, are charged with assaulting two Israeli-American men, allegedly because the two Israeli-Americans were speaking Hebrew.
Despite that claim, the District Attorney's office has been unable to find enough evidence to add hate crimes enhancements. The three defendants are instead charged with felony assault and misdemeanor battery, and there are questions about whether even that will stick.
The Fight and The Missing Video:
That there was, in fact, a fight on Santana Row on March 8, 2026 seems clear from the very brief available video clip which was amplified by the media. That particular clip was recorded by a bystander, and shows three slightly built young men swiftly incapacitating an older, heavier man, who appears to be Lior Zeevi.
But who initiated the conflict, and why, remains unknown to the public; the longer surveillance video has not yet been released.
And yet the point that was amplified by the police, the District Attorney’s office, local and national media, elected officials, and Jewish leaders, was that three men of Assyrian descent had beaten two Israeli men, allegedly for no other reason than that the Israeli men had been speaking Hebrew.
This March 16 headline in The New York Post typified the sensationalized reporting, and gives a sense of how far the story traveled:
Local media wasn't much more responsible.
But the available video also makes clear that, as soon as the three younger men managed to subdue the older, larger men, the younger men stopped. You could interpret this break as the media and elected officials had: as evidence that the young Assyrian-Americans fled from a crime scene.
Or you could interpret this as an indication that the defendants were themselves afraid of the older, larger men – and that the intent was to subdue, rather than to harm.
The police report does not indicate serious injuries to the victims. Both of the alleged victims stated that they did not want to go to the hospital when police offered. The police report also indicates that the alleged victims were at various points uncooperative and antagonistic toward police.
Conversely, the three defendants, once notified, turned themselves in to police, posted bail, and have been cooperating with every aspect of the investigation.
The Smear
Local media, prominent politicians, and Jewish leaders were quick to smear the young Santana Row defendants as “antisemitic” prior to even reading the entirety of the police report. They were undeterred by the fact that even Rosen’s office did not feel confident attaching hate crimes to the initial charging documents.
None acknowledged that the Assyrian-American defendants are themselves Semites, from one of the oldest Christian groups in the world, with a history of persecution that rivals, at least proportionally, Jewish victims of genocide.
U.S. Representative Ro Khanna rushed to assert on social media that the assault was, in fact, antisemitic. So did Rep. Sam Liccardo. And so did gubernatorial candidate Matt Mahan, currently the Mayor of San Jose.
For his part, Gavin Newsom, the most powerful elected official in the state, simply posted “This is disgusting” on X, and thanked the San Jose Police Department for their work.
A Startling Revelation In Court
One of the more dramatic moments in Wednesday’s hearing was Judge Hector E. Ramon’s stunned reaction when he was informed by one of the defense attorneys, Dmitry Stadlin, that the principal victim in the Santana Row case, Israeli-American businessman Lior Zeevi, is currently on trial for a hate crime that occurred in May 2025.
The issue of Zeevi’s hate crime charges came up because Stadlin had been obliged to subpoena documents from that case for the Santana Row case.
But Zeevi’s hate crime charges barely made the news, even as the non-hate-crime charges against the younger Assyrian-Americans were reported globally.
It is a pattern of bias mirrored in the San Jose Police Department’s incident report, which is replete with anonymous, contradictory, and inaccurate claims not only about the Santana Row defendants, but about their language, culture, and institutions.
Local Assyrian Christian Community Packs The Hearing
I had not expected a large crowd at Wednesday’s arraignment in San Jose, but when I arrived, the hallway outside the courtroom was already filled with members and leaders of the local Assyrian Christian community. Assyrian Christians are among the earliest Christians, and have suffered persecution for nearly two millennia, starting with the Romans. They lack a sovereign state, and are currently imperiled in their West Asian villages, which are spread throughout Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria.
In the U.S., Assyrians constitute a relatively small ethnic and religious minority, with their largest U.S. communities located in Michigan, Illinois (Chicago and its suburbs), and California’s Central Valley.
Many Assyrian Christians, like Armenian and Greek Christians, came to the United States after enduring genocide under the Ottoman Empire. During what is called the Sayfo, the Ottoman Empire slaughtered close to half of the small Assyrian Christian community then living in Ottoman-controlled land. The Sayfo overlapped with the Ottoman Empire’s genocide in the same era of 1.5 million Armenians, and an estimated 350,000 to 700,000 Greeks. In California, many Assyrian Christians made their homes in the Central Valley.
Most school curricula and media do not discuss the Sayfo at all; only recently have schools included curriculum about the genocide of Armenians.
This double standard – with the Holocaust being taught relentlessly, while the Sayfo and countless other genocides are almost entirely ignored – has echoes in the biased coverage of the Santana Row defendants in the media.
The Defendants
During the arraignment, all three of the defendants appeared in person and, with dutiful respect for the court, in well-tailored suits. The baby-faced Ramon Akoyans, a reed-like 18-year-old, stood solemnly beside his attorney, unaccustomed to the spotlight. His older brother Roma, at 20, appeared more confident. The third defendant, Bruneil Henry Chamaki, 32, is a UC Berkeley School of Law graduate, a corporate attorney, and a member of the California Bar in good standing.
In a manner that shamelessly reinforced some of the worst stereotypes of “Middle Eastern” men, news outlets and social media portrayed Chamaki and the younger defendants as brutishly macho. So incessant was this characterization (including but not limited to the Jweekly’s selective publishing of a shirtless image from Chamaki’s instagram account), that I was somewhat taken aback by how respectful and kind Chamaki was when I exchanged a few brief words with him and his attorney.
In contrast, Jweekly did not publish any images from the social media accounts of Israeli businessman Zeevi after Zeevi was charged with hate crimes. In fact, Jweekly did not report on Zeevi’s alleged hate crimes until two days before the arraignment. Similarly, the Mercury News reported on Zeevi’s alleged hate crimes only after Wednesday’s arraignment.
Assyrian Advisors
Chamaki is the founder of Assyrian Advisors, which provides mentorship to members of the Assyrian Christian community in the US. He is well-regarded by many leaders in the small Assyrian Christian community in California, who have described him as self-disciplined, rigorous, and dutiful.
After the biased Santana Row coverage in the media, members of Assyrian Advisors had received threats to their homes and their safety, and had to shut down significant parts of their website.
But no local media had elected to report on the threats against the Assyrian community.
That’s unfortunate, since the role of a group like Assyrian Advisors – to support Assyrians in the U.S. – has become more necessary for the larger Assyrian community. As many Assyrians in West Asia are experiencing increased privation and threat in their home villages, the continued success of Assyrian Christians in the U.S. is not just a matter of pride, but of group survival. No one is coming to rescue them.
Post-Arraignment Remarks From Deputy DA; Victim Advocate Petros
Outside the courtroom, Kenny O’Brien, the deputy DA, made a brief, awkward statement, captured in the video below. Note that at approximately 27 seconds in, a reporter wearing a gray sweater appears to ask about the separate charges against the alleged victim, Lior Zeevi. O’Brien does not directly respond to her question.
O’Brien’s remarks were followed by a statement from one of the active leaders within San Jose’s Assyrian-American community, Margaret Petros, who has forty years experience as a victims’ rights advocate in Santa Clara County. Petros described serial inconsistencies in the police report, and detailed threats made against the Assyrian Christian community as a result of the media’s amplification of the DA’s charges. She has been straightforward in her criticism of the District Attorney, Jeff Rosen. I hope to be able to write more about Margaret Petros and her advocacy in next week's article.
The Hate Crime Victim Who Is Himself Charged In A Hate Crime
As revealed in court on Wednesday, the principal alleged victim in this case, an Israeli-American businessman named Lior Zeevi, was himself charged in a serious felony with hate crimes enhancements in a May 2025 incident.
In that May 2025 incident, which took place approximately ten months before the Santana Row encounter, Zeevi is alleged to have repeatedly used his Porsche coupe to terrorize a transgender woman in another car, three times pulling in front of her and then slamming on his brakes. He then allegedly called her “a f**cking f*gg*t”, and threatened to shoot her. During this incident, a young boy was in the passenger seat that Zeevi was driving.
It is not the only legal woe Mr. Zeevi faces. He is also facing a civil suit for wrongful termination of a female worker who, among other things, alleges sexual discrimination and what appears to be sexual harassment of female workers at Zeevi’s business.
Curiously, Zeevi also claimed to have been the victim of an antisemitic attack on his business in August 2025, which was widely reported. When I checked with the San Jose Police Department, I was told that they had tried every lead, but had been unable to identify any suspects.
Video of the suspects from the August 2025 incident reported by Zeevi is curious for the manner in which the suspects perform their various acts of vandalism (breaking van windows and painting swastikas on the vans) in no particular hurry.
Zeevi, a business owner, is being represented in the hate crime case by the Public Defender. And it is Zeevi’s choice of a public defender that prompted reasonable inquiry from one of the attorneys for the Santana Row defendants, Dmitry Standlin.
This is a developing story. Next week’s article will cover inconsistencies in the police report. I plan to attend the hearing for Zeevi’s criminal trial, which is now scheduled for June. The next hearing in the Santana Row case is scheduled for mid-July.
©️2026 Eva Chrysanthe
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