Witness Describes Killings at Crack House

Shortly after 5 p.m. on Aug. 28, 1988, James Franklin Williams IV discovered the downside of being an entry-level employee of the Bryant Family, which authorities contend is a Pacoima-based, multimillion-dollar cocaine ring.

On that sweltering afternoon, four people, including a toddler, were shot to death, allegedly to settle an internal “Family” dispute over money and power. And, as Williams testified Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, he now believes his superiors in the organization “tried to set me up” for the killings.

Testifying under a grant of immunity from prosecution, Williams told the jury that he heard--rather than saw--the shootings. During his second day on the witness stand, Williams offered a gripping account of events that day inside the Bryant Family crack house on Wheeler Avenue in Lake View Terrace, where he was assigned to work as a money counter.

Williams recalled that he was in the kitchen, as ordered, watching a walkway so he could signal alleged Family leader Stanley Bryant when two men approached the front door. The visitors--convicted Family hit man Andre Armstrong and his companion James Brown--were both apparently unarmed. They were buzzed through a set of security doors and into a cage-like, metal entryway. Greetings were exchanged.

Bryant, one of four murder defendants in the trial, then gave Williams the signal to buzz him out a back door. As Bryant ran out the back, shots rang out at the front door, Williams testified.

“I heard one shot. I heard a scream, and I heard two more shots,” he said.

“The scream you heard, can you describe it?” Deputy Dist. Atty. Dale Davidson asked.

“Agony.”

Williams said he then left the house to back a green, older-model car into the garage, as Bryant had instructed him.

At the end of the driveway, he said he literally bumped into LeRoy Wheeler, a Family employee whom he had known since childhood. Wheeler, another defendant in the trial, was toting a shotgun.

“I hear Mr. Wheeler holler, ‘There’s a bitch in the car,’ ” Williams said. “Either that or, ‘Get out of the car, bitch.’. . . . Something like that.”

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He remembers glass breaking, but could not recall hearing gunshots.

“I didn’t look over there,” he added.

Prosecutors contend that Wheeler fatally shot Loretha Anderson, who was Brown’s girlfriend, and her daughter, 28-month-old Chemise English, as they sat in another car, parked in front of the house.

They also say defendants Jon Preston Settle and Donald Franklin Smith, two more Bryant Family employees, gunned down Armstrong and Brown at the behest of Bryant once they were trapped inside the security cage.

All four defendants are charged with four counts of murder, as well as the attempted murder of a second child who was cut by flying glass.

The men’s bodies were dumped in Lopez Canyon. The bodies of the woman and child were found around the corner from the Wheeler Avenue house.

Prosecutors contend that Armstrong had been set up because he was demanding payment for the time he spent in prison for a Family hit and was threatening to take over a large piece of the crack cocaine business.

Under cross-examination by Wheeler’s attorney, Bill McKinney, Williams said he now believes he also was being set up--to take the blame for the killings.

At the time, he testified, he did not question his orders, including Bryant’s request that he stay later than his usual 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift. But later, Williams said, he realized that the other Family members wore gloves; he was given none to wear.

The others drove off in cars, he added. But he had orders to walk down the street to a bus stop immediately after the shootings, taking note of who on the street might have witnessed what happened.

But under direct questioning by prosecutor Davidson, Williams portrayed himself as someone powerless to change the rapidly unfolding events.

He said he realized something unusual was happening when other Family members showed up that afternoon with guns. And it did not surprise him to learn a few days later that he had been identified and placed at the crime scene, Williams testified.

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“I wished I wasn’t there,” Williams said. “I saw the guns. I was given my instructions. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going to happen. I just knew I didn’t want no part of it.”

Davidson asked Williams why he did not back out, or refuse to follow his orders.

“No, no, it was too late,” Williams testified. “At the moment I was in too deep to back out of something I didn’t want no part of in the first place. It wouldn’t have been a very safe thing to do.”

Williams added, “The thought crossed my mind” to run from the house. “But I didn’t think I’d make it out of there.”