4 Teens Get Maximum Sentences in Slaying

MALIBU-Calling them remorseless, arrogant and dangerous, a judge Wednesday handed down maximum sentences for four Conejo Valley teenagers convicted in the slaying of the 16-year-old son of an LAPD officer.

Three of the teens received life sentences without possibility of parole, the fourth teen received 25 years to life--the maximum allowable punishment because he was only 15 at the time of the killing.

Their youthful faces without expression, the four defendants, Jason Holland, 19, and his brother Micah, 16, of Thousand Oaks, Brandon Hein, 19, of Oak Park and Tony Miliotti, 19, of Westlake Village, sat silently throughout the daylong sentencing hearing.

Even when confronted by the victim’s emotional father, they remained impassive.

“My wife and I will never understand why you had to kill him,” said Jim Farris, staring down the boys. He looked directly at the elder Holland brother, who admitted during the trial that he stabbed Jimmy Farris to death.

“I’ll never forget Jason Holland’s casual courtroom demonstration showing exactly how you killed my son,” Farris said.

Defense attorneys had spent two days pleading for leniency, based on a rarely used precedent set by a 1983 case during which an emotionally immature defendant’s sentence was declared disproportionate to the crime committed and later reduced.

But Malibu Municipal Judge Lawrence J. Mira rejected their arguments, tossing out the opinions of psychologists who said the Holland brothers, considered the leaders of the group, suffered from severe behavioral problems and from an abusive stepfather.

Mira gave Jason Holland, Hein and Miliotti life sentences, and Micah Holland the maximum sentence for his age--25 years to life. Because they killed Farris while committing a robbery, they were convicted of murder with a special circumstance, which requires a life sentence. Within minutes, all four defense attorneys were passing previously written appeals to the court clerk.

Before handing down his sentence, the judge said he believed the four teenagers set out on a deliberate crime spree the afternoon of May 22, 1995, starting with stealing alcohol from an acquaintance, then moving on to taking a wallet from an unlocked car and terrorizing its owner.

That day ended with the stabbing death of Jimmy Farris and the near fatal wounding of his friend Mike McLoren. The Hollands, Hein and Miliotti went to McLoren’s backyard fort in Agoura Hills, intending to steal some marijuana he had stashed there. A fifth youth, Chris Velardo, 18, of Oak Park--who pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter last fall and is awaiting sentencing--accompanied them but remained in the car.

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Though the convicted youths were not members of an organized gang, Mira said their actions that day were no different from that of a violent street gang.

“I believe on this tragic day, they formed their own gang,” Mira said. “The genesis of this group is in their lifestyle, their aimlessness, their purposelessness. They didn’t take their education seriously, they rejected their families’ values. They adopted a we-do-whatever-feels-good-for-us attitude. That is classic hedonism.”

Except for the stone-faced young defendants, the packed courtroom overflowed with emotion Wednesday. Miliotti’s attorney Curt Leftwich’s voice broke as he pleaded for leniency for his client. Sharry Holland, the mother of the Holland brothers, clutched a rosary as she sat in the gallery. Grandmothers, aunts and cousins of the defendants wept openly.

But the most passionate moments came when Jim and Judie Farris stepped forward to give their victim impact statements.

Grim-faced and dressed in a dark gray suit, Jim Farris climbed into the witness stand to ask for maximum sentences for his son’s killers.

“My son is dead and you people killed him,” he said. “And for that you need to be punished to the full extent of the law.”

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He thinks of his son every day, he told them, and will always miss him.

Farris gave a fierce defense of his son, who was accused by some friends of the defendants of being a regular participant in marijuana smoking at McLoren’s fort, a popular hangout for Agoura area teens.

“He wasn’t a drug user,” Farris said. “For you people who don’t believe that, the coroner found that he had no drugs in his system. He had only a trace of marijuana, like what someone who was around drug use might have. Nothing else.”

Reading from a thick black notebook, Judie Farris transfixed the court with her words. She had come, she said, to talk about Jimmy, to tell everyone what kind of person Jimmy was. In her eagerness to portray the son she loved so passionately, the words spilled rapidly from her mouth, quickly exceeding an hour’s time. She recounted her life with Jimmy, from his birth to the moment she saw him dead, lying on the McLoren kitchen floor.

In the 15 months since Jimmy was killed, she said, she has made little progress in recovering. She referred to herself as brain dead, constantly verging on tears, still disconsolate at the sight of her son’s empty bedroom. In every part of her home, she is reminded of Jimmy’s death.

“The first time I had to use a knife to do something,” she said. “Well, you’ll never know what that feels like.”

At one point during her testimony, she was blinded by tears. A bailiff brought her a box of tissues, while her husband sat behind her, his hand on her waist.

She chastised the defense attorneys, calling them by their last names.

“It made me sick every time you guys tried to minimize what they did,” she said.

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The worst thing her son Jimmy ever did, she said, was get toothpaste on the bathroom mirror. He was the kind of boy who liked to go out to dinner with his mom, who unabashedly told her that he loved her, and who delighted in the company of his father.

He was, she said, the opposite of his killers.

“I’m positive that the three of you don’t have a conscience,” she said. “Tony [Miliotti], I’m not sure about you, because when you looked at me during the trial it seemed like you were sorry, but today you haven’t looked at me at all.

“I can see the coldness in your eyes and the meanness in your heart,” she told the youths. “Look at Jimmy’s picture, look how warm he is.”

Behind her, at the center of a display of photographs of Jimmy as a baby, with friends, on camping trips, was a giant blowup of Jimmy’s final yearbook photo, his blond hair falling in his eyes, his blue eyes twinkling.

Judie Farris concluded by holding up a shock of that hair, a piece she cut from his head before he was buried.

“This is all I have left,” she said. “I wish I’d taken more.”

Immediately after the sentencing, members of the defendants’ families and their supporters gathered outside the courthouse in a scene that combined grief and rage. Miliotti’s relatives, their eyes red with tears, squared off against Farris’ friends, exchanging barbs and almost coming to blows on two occasions.

Parents of the youths took turns stepping up to a bank of microphones to vow their continued love and support for the four convicted teenagers.

“We’re never going to give up,” said Patricia Traetsch, Brandon Hein’s mother. “We love our son. I truly believe that if that house of drugs wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be here today. This may be the end of the chapter, but it is not the end of the book.”

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And Sharry Holland, her rosary replaced with a copy of the request for an appeal for her sons, said she will fight to have their convictions overturned.

“My grief and sympathy is and always has been with the Farris family,” she said. “But it is also for all the defendants and their families. I will appeal. My wish is to stay strong for my sons and the other boys so that they may continue to have hope. I will never stop fighting to see that real justice is done.”