Insults Fly Over Shooting of Tagger : Gunman, Surrounded by Praise, Trades Angry Barbs With Sister of Dead Teen-Ager

William Andrew Masters II, surrounded by media attention and public praise Friday following his release from jail after shooting to death an 18-year-old graffiti painter, blamed the dead youth’s mother for the slaying, calling her an “irresponsible, uncaring parent” for raising a criminal son.

The family of Cesar Rene Arce in Arleta shot back, blaming Masters’ mother for raising a “paranoid.”

The volley of insults flew as Arce’s family remained in mourning Friday, while three miles away, Masters spent the day giving telephone and in-person interviews to newspaper, radio and TV reporters. The interviews were interrupted by dozens of well-wishers--most of them strangers--calling his Sun Valley home.

Describing the midnight encounter under the Hollywood Freeway where he came upon Arce and a friend, David Hillo, 20, of North Hollywood, spray painting graffiti on the freeway support columns Tuesday, Masters said they had tried to rob him.

“This situation is what everybody lives in fear of--a couple of skinhead Mexicans robbing you at 1 a.m. with a screwdriver,” he said.

Masters, 35, said he blamed Arce’s mother.

“She murdered her son by being an irresponsible, uncaring parent,” he said. “Nobody who has been raised by responsible, caring adults goes around making armed robberies.”

Since his death, Arce’s grieving mother has spent many hours in the room of her slain son, wrapped in one of his jackets, unable to speak about what happened, the family has said. His sister Lilia, who continues to visit the site of his death, has done the public speaking for the family.

Lilia Arce said Masters’ comments about her mother were especially cruel: “My mom always tried to keep us out of trouble,” she said.

“It’s his mother’s fault for making that kid so paranoid. . . . He’s not a hero, he’s a killer.

“There’s going to be justice. He’s going to go back to court,” she said, referring to the possibility that the Los Angeles city attorney’s office could bring misdemeanor charges against Masters for carrying a concealed pistol without a permit.

Arce’s stepfather, Usvaldo Munoz, said in an interview he has little faith in the judicial system, which the family complains has failed them twice. Two of Arce’s sisters--Lilia and Marisol, now 13--were hit by a drunken driver several years ago and were in comas for several months, family members said, but prosecutors filed only misdemeanor drunk-driving charges against the motorist.

For much of Thursday night, Masters remained secluded in his apartment as television crews and reporters gathered outside. At 8 a.m. Friday morning, he said, his phone began ringing with calls from well-wishers thanking him for what he did and reporters again began queuing up outside.

Several of the congratulatory calls were from Latinos, he stressed. He said that he was skeptical about how long his celebrity would last, but that his greatest fear was that he would wind up “the poster boy for Aryan Nation,” a white supremacist group.

Masters went free Thursday after the district attorney’s office ruled that he killed Arce, and wounded Hillo in the buttock, in justifiable self-defense. Masters had a reasonable fear that Arce and Hillo--who admits he was carrying a screwdriver, but said he did not regard it as a weapon--were going to seriously injure him, prosecutors said.

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Police and the district attorney’s office said they were flooded with dozens of calls from graffiti-haters who expressed support for Masters, but that public opinion played no role in the decision not to prosecute him.

Masters, an actor who has had small roles in television shows and local theater, encountered Arce and Hillo while he was on one of his customary late-night strolls in a desolate, industrialized part of Sun Valley. Masters and Hillo agree the confrontation began when Masters noted down the license plate number of the taggers’ car.

When he said he planned to give the number to police, they demanded the paper, Masters said.

Masters said he gave up the paper and the two then tried to rob him, which Hillo denies.

Masters said that he did not want to kill Arce, but that as he tried to leave, Arce repeatedly blocked his way. He used the $149 Makarov .380 pistol he had in a fanny pack when Arce got close enough to stab him if he’d had a knife, Masters said.

“I did what he forced me to do,” Masters said.

He added that he intended only to disable Hillo, who suffered minor wounds in the buttock and was released after brief hospital treatment. Masters has been shooting since he was a youth, practicing with an air gun on a target on his bedroom wall in Holyoke, Mass., he said.

Masters reiterated Friday that he did not shoot Arce and Hillo because they were painting graffiti, but because “they were committing an armed robbery and when I tried to walk away from them they sprung on me,’ he said.

“The tagging, that doesn’t really bother me. As a duty to my neighbors, as a duty to my neighborhood, I saw someone committing a small misdemeanor. Someone was going to have to clean it up,” he said, and he thought that if he gave the license number to police, they might force the taggers to do it.

The shooting left him traumatized, Masters said, recalling that he broke into tears when a motorist came by to ask what happened.

“It was starting to sink in to me at this point that I had just killed an (18-year-old),” Masters said. “That was pretty upsetting.” He said he always knew he might have to kill someone with the gun he carries, but had imagined it would be “some grungy or disgusting 35-or-40-year-old career criminal.”

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But he becomes passionate when he talks of people taking back the streets from criminals. “We have let the criminal take so much control over our lives we have redefined what a decent person is,” he said. “We have let these scumbags redefine our communities.”

People should defend the right to take long walks at night, the time his father called “the cool time of the day,” as he intends to keep doing, he said.

“When I was sitting in the cell, I was saying, ‘I’m never going to take that walk again,’ ” he said, but then changed his mind. “That’s my neighborhood,” he said, and he will continue walking in it at night and will continue carrying a gun.

He realizes that runs the risk of another deadly encounter, he said, particularly if friends of Arce’s seek retribution, which he views as a possibility.

“But,” he said, “I’m a Marine. I am going to make sure I take as many of the enemy with me.”

Masters spent only a month in the Marine Corps in 1986 after spending a semester in the Army ROTC, he said. He was discharged because his record showed a charge of carrying a pistol into a federal courthouse, he said.

Masters, who fought a lengthy court battle against a Texas state law that he said unconstitutionally denied him the right to carry martial arts swords in public, said he entered a Texas courthouse during that process and handed in a pistol he was carrying legally to a courthouse guard, as he had been told to do.

The guard said he should have handed in the gun before getting to that point in the building and filed the charge. It was later dropped, but when the charge appeared on his record during a check by the Marine Corps, he was discharged shortly after he joined, he said.

“I have the worst luck with bureaucracies,” he said.

A mile from Masters’ house Friday, a group of about a dozen self-described taggers who gathered at Branford Park said they did not regard the killing of their friend as heroic.

“He’s not a hero,” said Manuel, a 17-year-old tagger who was with Arce minutes before he was killed. “A hero saves lives, he took one.”

Friends said that Arce had joined the CFK tagging crew, which stands for “Crew Forever Known” or “Crew For Kings,” the Friday before he was shot. They said they plan to paint a legal mural somewhere in honor of Arce, whose tag “Insta,” could still be viewed Friday near the underpass where he died.

The shooting will not curb their graffiti painting, several of the youths said, but will make them more cautious.

“There’s kind of like a feeling that somebody is going to come up and shoot us and say, ‘Hey, I can get away with it,’ ” said Tony, 18.

“They act like just because he was a tagger that he deserved to die,” Manuel added.

Times staff writers Julio Moran and Ann W. O’Neill contributed to this story.