Mother Lashes Out at Son’s Killer During Sentencing : Courts: Wanda Johnson says Leon Durell Hobley should die for 1991 slayings. But gang member, who was a minor when he murdered Demon Johnson and a friend, gets maximum penalty of life in prison.

Shortly before a judge sentenced a teen-age gang member to spend the rest of his life in prison for the murders of her son and another man, Wanda Johnson faced the convict, openly wishing he could get the death penalty.

“Because I’d gladly push the button, pull the trigger, whatever it takes. I’d like to slap a hole in his head like he did my son,” Johnson said sternly as she stared at Leon Durell Hobley, who could not be sentenced to death because he committed the crime little more than three months shy of adulthood.

“When he pulled the trigger and killed (her son, Demon Johnson) he killed me,” Johnson said.

Hobley, 19, slouched in a chair five yards away, his hands cuffed behind his back, tapped his foot rapidly on the floor and grimaced as he looked up at Johnson seated in the witness box next to Torrance Superior Court Judge Thomas Sokolov.

Sokolov imposed the maximum sentence on Hobley for the 1991 murders of 20-year-old Johnson and Major Blackman, 21. The judge said the killing, which occurred in Redondo Beach during a car robbery, was “one of the most heinous” he has known of in his 24 years on the bench.

But before the judge made his decision, Hobley turned his shackled body toward Johnson’s startled relatives.

“I apologize to the family and, you know, the person and I apologize to my mom and grandmom because I’m in here and not out there with them,” Hobley said.

But he went on to maintain his innocence, dismissing eyewitness testimony linking him to the murder as “hearsay.”

“You may think I should be in prison for a long time for something I didn’t do,” said Hobley, who had glared at the family before given a chance to speak. But, he added, “I’m going to still stay strong no matter how many years I get.”

A cousin of Johnson called Hobley “a menace to society.” After the hearing, Wanda Johnson called Hobley’s sentence “the next best thing to the death penalty.”

According to eyewitnesses, on the morning of June 8, 1991, Hobley approached Johnson and Blackman, who were seated in a car and chatting with friends in a bank parking lot across the street from the Galleria at South Bay shopping mall.

Without provocation, Hobley shot Johnson and pulled his body out of the car, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Jennings. He then shot a cowering Blackman, hopped in the car, and drove off before dumping Blackman’s body in an alley several miles away, near Carson.

Hobley was arrested in July, but escaped from officers as he was led into the Inglewood courthouse for a hearing. When he was found in October, he had a handcuff key dangling from his necklace, authorities said at the time.

Hobley’s attorney, Tom Althaus, said robbery motivated the slayings. He agreed with Jennings that the crime was “horrendous,” but he urged the judge to allow Hobley the chance for parole--after serving 55 years in prison, when he would be 74 years old.

Jennings suggested that prosecutors would have sought the death penalty if Hobley had been an adult at the time of the crime.

Althaus said Hobley’s conduct was inexcusable, but could be explained in light of his background in a violent Compton neighborhood and a troubled household.

Hobley, Althaus said, was shuffled among relatives including a drug-addicted mother, who in an interview after the hearing acknowledged past drug use and displayed scars on her leg from four gunshot wounds she said she sustained in a drive-by shooting.

“I don’t think he did it,” said Veldayvatta Hobley Pollard, 35.

And if he did, Pollard said, “probably the people he was hanging out with” drove him to the crime.

“He was a regular child who grew up in a ghetto,” said Pollard, who quarreled with Johnson’s relatives in the hallway, although Hobley’s great-grandmother, Carola Thomas Childs, hugged and kissed Wanda Johnson during a break in the proceedings.

“He had to live by the rules and regulations of the area he stayed in,” Pollard added.

Childs said she took Hobley to church when he was a child so he would “be God-fearing.” When he developed an “attitude problem,” she said, he received psychological counseling, although his frequent moves among relatives made it hard to keep it up.

In her testimony, Wanda Johnson transfixed courtroom observers as she testified about her anguish and scolded Hobley.

“My son’s life was not such where he needed your cowardly help (to put him) out of his misery,” said Johnson, whose son worked as a janitor while caring for an infant daughter. “So don’t stand straight (and) pat yourself on the back too soon because it doesn’t take courage to be a coward.

“I gave my all, and then some, as a teen-age mother to raise my son to be a decent human being, and all that for him to be taken out by a wimp,” she continued. “We have to stop patting these criminals on the back . . . We must stop letting crime pay.”

The death penalty, Johnson said, must be regularly implemented “to show these criminals what it feels like, the fright of knowing . . . you’re going to die.”