California IN BRIEF : SANTA ANA : Youth Convicted of Hate Killing

A young man who toted Hitler quotations and a white-supremacist cartoon was convicted Tuesday of murder and a hate crime as the accomplice in the 1994 shooting of a black man in Huntington Beach. An Orange County Superior Court jury deliberated about 2 1/2 days before finding Robert Dylan Wofford, now 19, guilty of second-degree murder and the added hate-crime charge. Wofford, who is white, faces 19 years to life in prison. The verdict unleashed a torrent of emotion among relatives and friends of Vernon Flournoy, 44, who was slain by strangers outside a fast-food restaurant. “Oh, thank God!” said La Verne Clark, who was formerly married to Flournoy. Clark embraced the victim’s wife, Sharon Flournoy, who wept loudly. The verdict came after jurors had been divided over whether Wofford was just as responsible for the murder as the gunman, Jonathan Russell Kinsey. Kinsey, 20, of Huntington Beach, pleaded guilty two weeks ago to murder and hate-crime charges in connection with Flournoy’s killing on Sept. 15, 1994, along with felony charges relating to a separate shooting attack on two Latino men.