‘I Should Have Just Read a Book,’ Says Tagger : Shooting: David Hillo, the man wounded by William Masters over graffiti incident, talks about that night and trying to get his life back on track.

It’s been quite a ride for David Hillo. From tagger and low-grade thorn in the side of society to international cause celebre, and back again.

Now Hillo, who swapped small talk with Geraldo Rivera and fielded calls from foreign governments offering their support against a racist American legal system, says he just wants to do his time and get on with his life.

He is finally ready to forget the man who made him famous by putting a bullet in his rear.

“I’ve already let him go,” Hillo says of William Masters. “If I wanted to do something [out of revenge] I would have.”

Masters is the passerby who shot Hillo and killed his best friend, Cesar Rene Arce, at a Sun Valley freeway overpass, where the two men were spray-painting graffiti. The incident became a national symbol for the public’s rage over graffiti. It also became a focus of minority complaints against the legal system when the district attorney’s office ruled the shooting justifiable because Hillo was armed with a screwdriver.

The controversy catapulted the two men onto the national stage. An unlikely pair of polemicists in America’s ongoing symposium on race: There was Masters, the gun-toting passerby who showed little remorse after the shooting, accusing Arce’s parents of not raising him right, and Hillo, the withdrawn, baby-faced young man who had been in trouble since he was 16. Hillo recalled his encounter on “Geraldo,” “20/20” and Charles Perez’s television show, among others.

It was a brief, incandescent moment of fame, but now Hillo’s life has tumbled back into a familiar pattern. Only 20, he is serving a 905-day sentence at the Wayside Honor Rancho on a variety of charges, ranging from vandalism to grand theft for taking $59 worth of cold medicines from a Lucky store in June.

Now, both men are backing away from the celebrity spotlight. Hillo sums up his brush with fame this way: “I should have just read a book instead of tagging” that night.

Masters’ attorney, Chuck Michel, declined to let his client speak for the record. Michel worried that Masters’ penchant for saying things that could be “misconstrued” might flare up as he approaches an Aug. 7 trial date on misdemeanor firearms charges associated with the Arce killing.

In the past, Masters inflamed a racially tense situation by showing little sympathy for the men he shot. He referred to Arce and Hillo as “Mexican skinheads,” a phrase that still nettles Hillo. “There’s no such thing,” Hillo said.

Michel insists Masters is not a racist, but admitted “he is not adept at phrasing things politically correctly.” The bottom line, Michel said, is that Masters would also like to put the affair behind him.

From the beginning, the incident that started everything was cloaked in mystery. All that was clear was that Masters, a part-time actor and writer who had been charged in Texas for carrying swords in public, was taking a midnight stroll Jan. 31. He came upon Hillo and Arce spraying graffiti at a Sun Valley freeway overpass.

This was nothing new for Hillo, a lanky 6-footer known as GES, SPECIAL and SNEAKY in tagger circles. Hillo had been arrested at least four times for vandalism and spent five months in a youth camp.

He and Arce, 18, were part of the same tagging crew, CFK, which stood for, among other things, Crew for Kings.

A high school dropout who never knew his real father, Hillo can be taciturn and monosyllabic at times and outgoing at others. He has a round face with even, well-made features. He admits girls have been interested for years.

He and Arce had been friends since elementary school. “He was real nice,” Hillo said in the interview. “If he saw an old lady carrying groceries, he would go over to see if he could help.”

Masters told police that when he saw Arce and Hillo tagging, he jotted down the license number of their car. He shot them after they threatened him with a screwdriver and tried to rob him, he said.

Hillo has repeatedly insisted he was not trying to rob Masters. He cited Masters’ first comment to police, which he later changed, as proof that Masters was a vigilante looking for trouble. “I shot him because he was spray-painting,” a sobbing Masters told police that night.

Hillo says that after Masters shot him, he walked up and lectured the fallen Hillo. “He was telling me, ‘Why was I tagging? Why did you make me shoot you?’ ”

Hillo also told more than one story. Police said he first told them he had been wounded in a drive-by shooting, then said he never had a screwdriver that night. He finally admitted he was holding a screwdriver and gave Masters a defense when he told police he could understand why the 35-year-old man “panicked out.” Prosecutors ruled that Masters had acted in self-defense, and filed no charges.

Luis Carrillo, who represented Hillo at the time, accused the police of doing a slipshod investigation aimed at clearing Masters, whom he called “a white guy that looks like he belongs in England.”

Hillo, who had left no more lasting impression on the world than the few road sign scrawlings that had not yet been erased, found himself a cause celebre. He jetted to New York and Philadelphia and stayed in fashionable hotels. He took calls from politicians in Mexico asking if he needed help in fighting the forces of racism that allowed Masters to go free.

It was a heady experience for Hillo and his girlfriend, Lilia Arce, Rene’s sister, with whom Hillo has a 2-year-old daughter. Friends say Lilia Arce got so caught up in the frenzy that she quit her job as a dental office receptionist.

“People here say, ‘You’re famous,’ ” he said of his inmate friends. “When I was doing all these things, I never smiled about it. The reason I went on was to give Rene’s side. People were saying [Masters] was a hero.”

It was an eye-opening experience, especially the reactions from viewers and listeners to talk radio.

“All the white people were for him,” Hillo said. “All the Mexican people were for us.”

Once the media frenzy went away, Hillo’s life fell into an old pattern. He was sentenced to 20 days in jail on the vandalism charge connected with the freeway tagging incident. Another 20 days was added because he refused to surrender as ordered.

Less than two weeks later, he was arrested after another graffiti spree. Within hours of his release on that charge, he was rearrested and charged with robbery after he allegedly hit a security guard while trying to make his escape with cold medicines.

Michel said Hillo’s continuing problems vindicate his client. “Bill feels Mr. Hillo’s subsequent conduct is indicative” of the kind of behavior that Masters accused him of on that January night.

A probation report prepared prior to Hillo’s sentencing accused Hillo of being “deeply antisocial” and leading a “parasitic existence chiefly dedicated to the defacing or destruction of the property of others.”

David Kestenbaum, the attorney who worked out the plea bargain that saved Hillo from prison, disagreed. Compared to others growing up in the same troubled milieu as Hillo, he is “on the not-so-bad side.”

In Kestenbaum’s view, Hillo was caught up in a series of events that caused him to spiral downward. First, he lost his best friend. Then, three more friends were killed when the car in which they were riding was hit broadside one morning in June by another car fleeing the police.

Hillo knew them by their tagger names, TROPIC, ENDS and ESTEK. But he insists they were not out tagging that morning, as some have speculated.

They had been out with some girls. They were less than a block from home when their car was hit at Sherman Way and Kester in Van Nuys. Ironically, that was the same intersection where Hillo lived with Lilia Arce.

Hillo was tagging memorials to them when he was arrested on the most recent vandalism charge.

Now, the media tsunami has washed over the tall, soft-spoken Hillo and swept on. There are no more TV interviews. Hillo’s girlfriend has moved to Arizona. Worst of all, key family members have abandoned him, saying he dishonored their name.

He says he doesn’t blame them. He let them down “too much,” he said.

Kestenbaum has warned him to change his ways or risk doing life “on the installment plan. . . . He’s become a political Ping-Pong ball now,” Kestenbaum said.

When asked what lies ahead for him, Hillo said: “All the hard things are in the past, I like to believe. Just like everything fell into place going downhill, everything will fall into place going up.”