Young Slaying Suspect Believed Victim Killed Mother, Lawyer Says

A former Oxnard High School football running back shot his stepfather to death after his mother’s suicide because he believed the man had killed her, his attorney said Thursday.

Ventura County Deputy Public Defender Howard Asher outlined what he said was a swift sequence of events leading to the slaying of Walter Bell on Monday.

The 17-year-old learned from his grandfather that his mother, Regina Lewis, had been fatally shot, searched her room to see if she had taken a gun with her, found a large-caliber pistol and then shot Bell within moments of his arrival at the family’s Oxnard condominium, Asher said.

“What I believe was going through this boy’s mind was that the person who was coming through the door . . . had just killed his mother,” he said. “I think that’s pretty reasonable.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Holmes refused to comment on the defense theory, but said prosecutors will decide by Monday which charges to file and whether they want to try the youth, who has no criminal record and remains unidentified because of his age, as an adult.

Meanwhile, sheriff’s deputies and juvenile authorities are planning to escort the youth to his mother’s funeral in handcuffs this morning in an extraordinary move approved by the district attorney’s office and granted by Superior Court Judge Robert Bradley in Juvenile Court, Holmes said.

The youth also will have visiting privileges extended so his grandparents and other relatives can see him at Colston Youth Center, where juvenile prisoners are normally restricted to visits only by their parents, Holmes said.

The youth’s father, who hasn’t seen him since he was 5, lives in Philadelphia and his grandparents live in Ventura County, Holmes said.

“The judge said don’t restrict it to what, for him, is an almost impossible list,” Holmes said. “His stepfather’s dead, his father’s back East and his mother’s deceased.”

Lewis, 42, had been estranged from Bell for three years, and the two were in the process of a divorce just before their deaths, investigators said.

Lewis’ body was found slumped over the steering wheel of a car parked in the Oxnard Shores area about 11:15 a.m. Monday, with a single gunshot wound in the upper chest, Oxnard police said.

Less than two hours later, Bell met the youth in the condominium in the 1200 block of Miramar Walk, where Lewis and her son had been living after she separated from Bell.

Initially, coroner’s investigators said Bell was at the home first and his stepson arrived later.

But Asher said the youth was there first and learned of his mother’s death in a phone call from his grandfather.

He was told “that she was killed by a gunshot wound and that she was found at the beach,” Asher said. “He knew his mother was not a beach-type person.”

Asher said the youth “looked in her room to see if she’d brought a gun with her when she left the house, and he found this other gun,” which police identified as a Chinese-made, .38-caliber pistol, Holmes said.

Then Bell walked through the front door and the youth shot him, Asher said.

Lewis’ funeral is to be held at 11 a.m. at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Oxnard, and Bell’s funeral will be held there at 10 a.m. Saturday. Bell’s co-workers at Colston Youth Center, where he was a juvenile probation officer, plan to hold a memorial service at work for him at 1 p.m. today, according to relatives.

The couple are to be buried at Ivy Lawn Cemetery.