NEW YORK (AP) – The Rev. Al Sharpton returned to Howard Beach on Monday.

He went by car instead of marching. There were no furious crowds hurling racial slurs. The reporters and photographers swarming him nearly outnumbered the protesters decrying last week’s racially tinged baseball bat attack on a 22-year-old black man.

But anger still simmered among the whites of the Queens neighborhood who watched Sharpton from their front yards, declined to give reporters their names and almost unanimously blamed the victim of the early morning attack for the assault that left him hospitalized with a fractured skull.

“What were they doing here at 3 in the morning?” said Michael, 41, who declined to provide his last name, of the victim and his two black friends. “They always come here. They steal, and no one does anything about it.”

Sharpton marched on Howard Beach nearly 19 years ago after a gang of whites beat and chased three blacks who ventured into Howard Beach on foot when their car broke down. Michael Griffith, 23, was struck and killed by a car as he fled his attackers.

A week later, hundreds of police officers were needed at a protest attended by an insult-shouting crowd of residents of the almost entirely white neighborhood of single-family homes set off from the rest of Queens by parkland, highway and John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The circumstances of last week’s assault were more complicated than the December 1986 attack, according to those involved. At least one of Moore’s friends has acknowledged that he intended to steal a car before the attack around 3:30 a.m. on June 29, police have said.

And officials have described as credible an account by the son of a New York police detective who said two black men who may have been part of Moore’s group tried to rob him shortly before the assault.

City officials almost immediately condemned the attack as a bias crime unjustified by any legitimate fears of wrongdoing by the victims.

Held without bail in the attack were Nicholas Minucci, an unemployed 19-year-old with a history of arrests for violence, and Anthony Ench, 21, who allegedly stole Moore’s sneakers and earring after Minucci hit him with the bat.

A defense lawyer has said Moore provoked the attack by holding a screwdriver to Minucci’s neck.

Sharpton, City Councilman Charles Barron, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry and several dozen supporters changed their plans to march into Howard Beach on Monday and instead drove to a shady intersection about half a block from the front yard where Moore was beaten.

“We want Howard Beach residents to march,” Sharpton said. “We want to see if the community of Howard Beach will stand up and denounce racism.”

Barron said: “You claim the community has changed so much, you march.”

But an anti-racism march seemed unlikely as a group of local young white men in white undershirts, gold chains and backward baseball caps posed for the cameras in front of an SUV decorated with an American flag and the words “Free Ench” soaped onto its windshield.

AP-ES-07-04-05 1800EDT