Notes on a Night Walker

It was an odd and eerie feeling to sit across from the man, to hear him laugh loudly, to listen to his banter . . . and to know that only a week earlier he had killed another human being.

But then, William Andrew Masters II is not your ordinary kind of guy.

His response to the death of an unarmed tagger is best described as a shrug of remorse that simultaneously acknowledges a young man’s bloody end while absolving himself of the slightest blame.

“I’m not happy he died,” Masters said casually as we talked in the converted garage he calls home, “but I kind of figured he would. I shot him at point-blank range.”

He is a tall, slim man of 35, almost boyish in appearance, dressed in jeans, plaid shirt and sneakers. His manner is offhanded, bordering on mellow, disconnected from the events that have cast him in an avenger’s role.

Without knowledge of the incident, and gauging the low level of his regret, one would assume Masters had simply rid himself of household vermin, measuring the amount of toxicity in a tank of insecticide necessary to do the job.

“I found out the next day he’d died,” he said. The tone was edged with curiosity. “I remember reading that actually only 15% of those types of wounds are fatal, 12% if it’s a knife wound. It goes way up when there’s a rifle involved.”

When I tried to refocus his thinking toward the realization that he had killed someone, Masters donned a cloak of detachment that is the uniform of those who will never be cornered.

“How do you feel about it?” I asked.

“I don’t feel anything,” he said.

*

It happened on the last day of January. A sometime actor and screenwriter, Masters was out walking just past midnight near his Sun Valley home. He carried a .380 semiautomatic pistol. It wasn’t the first time he carried a weapon.

His interest in guns dates back to 1964 when Catherine Genovese became a national symbol of emotional detachment. Thirty-eight neighbors watched, and did nothing, as she was stabbed to death near her Queens, N.Y., home.

Masters remembers reading about it 10 years after the incident. “I said to myself I would never be put in that position,” he told me. “What happened to Kitty Genovese would never happen to me. I decided when I was old enough, I would carry a gun. I’ve been carrying one since I was 21.”

He was armed the night he came across Cesar Arce, 18, and David Hillo, 20, who were painting graffiti on a freeway overpass. Masters wrote down the license number of their car, was confronted by the youths and the shooting occurred.

Arce was killed and Hillo wounded. The district attorney’s office refused to prosecute. Whether or not Masters will even be charged with carrying a concealed weapon without a permit is problematical.

Masters was praised as a hero by those who saw him as another Bernhard Goetz, the New Yorker who shot four black youths trying to rob him in a subway car. The comparison proves once more into what peculiar directions our hunger for heroes can lead us.

Masters avoids the question of heroics by saying simply, “I feel good about myself. I did what they forced me into doing. It won’t haunt me.”

He’ll keep walking at night, he says. And, reaching into a drawer to display a .32-caliber automatic, promises he’ll keep carrying a gun.

*

Since the shooting, I have heard from many who have asked me to join them in elevating Masters to sainthood for his lethal confrontation with two taggers.

One recalled a column I wrote on the fear that accompanies us on night walks and said that Masters had proved we don’t have to be afraid. All we have to do, he assured me, is “pack iron.”

He was talking to the wrong man. Masters, to begin with, is a strange and disaffected loner, a scary kind of guy who ought to be nobody’s hero. That he occupies the role is disquieting commentary on the gunslinger mentality that is corroding our society.

His disassociation from the killing is especially unnerving. I wondered as I sat in his dim and cluttered room if fear would drive us all to excessive response, and then cloak us with the uncomfortable ability to laugh it off later.

I’m no stranger to killings. I saw it on the battlefields of Korea and I’ve seen it on the streets of many cities in the years I’ve been a journalist. But to see it unaccompanied by regret, to hear the smiling shooter hailed as a hero, sends a chill through me.

As I left Masters to his disorganized darkness, he said, “I’ll get on with my life.” But, sadly, the young man he killed will not. And there’s not a damned thing heroic about that.