A federal judge has dismissed three of four charges of racism leveled by the parent of a teen homicide victim in a lawsuit

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton dismissed each of the two charges made against Union City, and one of the two claims against the school district in the suit filed by Angelique Paige, the mother of Vernon Eddins, a black 14-year-old shot in Union City by a group of young men in 2007. Paige's wrongful death lawsuit, filed in early 2009, said that officials from the city and the school district had ignored threats of racially motivated violence made by Latino gangs against her son and other black students before the fatal shooting. She also claimed that Union City's police department had violated her son's constitutional rights because it did not provide him and other black students the same protection they had given Latino gang members, and that police knew that racially motivated threats were being made toward black students. But Hamilton ruled in an Oakland courtroom that Paige and her attorneys had not proved the claims. Eddins was slain Dec. 21, 2007, after he and several of his friends encountered a group of 18- to 20-year-old Latino men in front of Barnard-White Middle School, police said. In 2009, police offered a $35,000 reward to anyone providing information that would lead to an arrest and conviction for the homicide. The case remains unsolved. Attorneys John Burris and Pamela Price, representing five East Bay families, filed a class-action lawsuit in 2010 claiming that Union City and the school district violated the civil rights of black youths by failing to protect them from violence. One of the incidents cited by the attorneys occurred in January 2010, when eight black Union City youths - one of whom wore clothing bearing Eddins' picture - were fired upon with a gun but not struck at Southland mall in Hayward. Burris and Price said that the group of black youths was targeted by a Latino gang based in Union City.