Hawkins Gets Double Life Prison Term for Murders

James Hawkins Jr., who, with his father, a Watts grocer, once was celebrated for battling street gang violence, was sentenced Thursday to a double life term without the possibility of parole for the execution-style slayings of two reputed drug dealers.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Marsha N. Revel pronounced sentence after a jury in her court convicted Hawkins of the June, 1984, shooting deaths of Roger Grant and Larry Turner and found true a special circumstance allegation that he committed multiple murders.

In the penalty phase of the trial, jurors determined that Hawkins should face life in prison rather than the death penalty. Revel thereafter had no discretion to impose the death penalty.

A co-defendant in the killings, Marshall Bridges, is still awaiting trial. Prosecutors alleged that Bridges, a convicted murderer who was on parole from prison in 1984, helped Hawkins kill Grant and Turner for money and drugs. Turner and Grant each were shot several times, prosecutors said.

Turner’s body was found bound and gagged at his South Los Angeles home. Grant’s body was found on a Fontana road.

Hawkins, 42, did not visibly react as Revel pronounced the sentence.

He is already serving a 28-year prison term for manslaughter in the 1983 slaying of a 19-year-old gang member outside Hawkins’ father’s grocery store.

Hawkins claimed that the gang member, Anttwon Thomas, was assaulting a woman and her five children when he intervened.

Several weeks after he was convicted in that case in 1985, Hawkins escaped from the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles and remained at large for a few months.

He was recaptured in Contra Costa County and faces additional charges arising from a gunfight with a sheriff’s deputy there.

Police said the .44-caliber pistol taken from Hawkins in the Northern California arrest had been used to kill Grant.