Death Penalty in Halloween Killings Urged

Three years to the day after a trio of trick-or-treating boys were fatally ambushed on Halloween night in Pasadena, a jury recommended the death penalty Thursday for three gang members convicted in the killings.

Lorenzo Newborn, 26, Herbert McClain, 28, and Karl Holmes, 21, sat impassively in a Los Angeles courtroom as a clerk read the verdicts in the 1993 crime, which came to symbolize the growing vulnerability of one of childhood’s most cherished rituals.

The three victims--Stephen Coats and Reggie Crawford, both 14, and Edgar Evans, 13--were killed while they were making their way home from a cousin’s birthday party. They had just turned down a ride home from Coats’ mother. They were shot by gang members, who prosecutors said were determined to avenge an earlier killing and mistook the children for gang rivals.

Police investigators found Halloween candy scattered across the crime scene.

“These defendants were the worst of the worst and they deserved the death penalty,” prosecutor Antony Myers said. “The victims were innocent children who were gunned down for no reason other than the gang mentality of the defendants.”

As the verdicts were read, Katrina Evans, the mother of Edgar, pursed her lips, furrowed her brow and wept. When the court clerk said “death,” she looked toward the courtroom ceiling and silently mouthed the words, “Thank you, thank you.”

Pasadena residents were stunned by the senselessness of the slayings, which took the lives of three bright students with promising futures.

Evans called the verdict a victory against gang violence.

“Now we are showing gang members that we are being tough, that you do a crime, you are going to pay for what you do,” she said, her eyes bright with tears. “Now we are taking back our cities, our communities.”

In a painful irony, the verdict came as Pasadena was preparing to celebrate the official Halloween night party that was the community’s chief response to the killings and parents’ concerns about safety. Just hours after the verdicts, the parents knew, they would see children walking through their neighborhood in costume.

A jury convicted the three men in December, but deadlocked during the penalty phase. After six days of deliberations and straw polls, they could not agree whether to sentence the three men to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Opting to retry the penalty phase, prosecutors and defense attorneys put on a monthlong mini-trial for a new jury. The jury deliberated the defendants’ fates for eight days.

The only juror to offer a comment said in a written statement that “I had to follow God’s law and the laws of justice.” The juror, who described himself as an “older black man,” cited a passage in the Bible that calls for “the avenger of blood” to kill those who “lie in wait” and attack their neighbors.

The three defendants were first brought to trial in 1995.

Myers and Deputy Dist. Atty. Jonlyn Callahan argued that McClain and his friends were eager to avenge the gang shooting of their associate, Fernando Hodges. Leaving the emergency room at Huntington Memorial Hospital where Hodges lay dying, the men drove around Pasadena until they saw a group of unusually tall young boys, one of whom carried a blue bandanna in his pocket, which the attackers mistook for the signal of a rival Crip gang.

Newborn and Holmes took their places in some bushes--while McClain waited elsewhere--and waited for the group of children to walk by, prosecutors said. Three others in the group of about 10 boys were slightly wounded.

Prosecutors contended that two of the men--Holmes and McClain--later bragged about the shooting.

McClain confirmed at least part of the prosecution’s theory when he testified, under cross-examination, that after Hodges was killed he was so angry he set out for revenge. “I felt I was going to get me some ‘get back’ for that, I was going to retaliate. . . . I was going to kill a Crip.”

But contrary to prosecutors’ contentions, McClain said he went home without meeting up with his fellow gangsters and without avenging Hodges’ death.

The three defendants were each convicted on three counts of first-degree murder and five counts of attempted murder. Two other men linked to the killings received suspended sentences this year.

Formal sentencing by Superior Court Judge J. D. Smith is scheduled for Jan. 21. Smith can follow the recommendation of the jury or sentence the defendants to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

During the second penalty phase, the defense argued that the jurors should spare the men’s lives because there was still doubt about their guilt. Prosecutors, they said, introduced no physical evidence linking the three to the crime, no murder weapon and no positive identifications from any of the surviving boys.

Newborn’s attorney, Carl Jones, made an appeal to the jurors’ hearts. All three men were certain to die in prison, regardless of the jury’s decision. The only question left was when their deaths should be.

“Mercy is twice blessed,” Jones told the jury. “It is blessed by the person receiving, but it is also a blessing to the person giving it.”

Newborn’s mother testified that her son had a difficult childhood rife with domestic violence. He was horribly teased as a boy because of his lisp and a pronounced limp, and was severely learning disabled to the point that he was called retarded.

McClain opted to represent himself during the penalty phase, although the court appointed an attorney to join him as a legal advisor.

In a closing argument rife with obscenities, disparaging comments about prosecutors and declarations of innocence, McClain took pains to explain his courtroom behavior to the jury.

“I can’t come in here and put on no suit and be something different than what I am,” McClain said. He asked jurors to judge the content of his case, not the words he used to convey it. “If I disrespected anybody with my approach, I apologize.”

Looking back on his testimony, McClain said, he regretted much of it.

“I’m not ashamed of being a gang member because I love my homeboys and not everything we do is bad,” McClain said. “This whole situation boils down to me being a gang member and saying and doing stupid stuff.”

“If you think I’ll run around and get little kids with their Halloween candy, then kill me,” McClain said in his closing argument. “If I were half of the gangster this dude [Myers] makes me, I wouldn’t be here.”

As the jury decision was read Thursday, Katrina Evans felt numb. Later, she talked about the terrible vision of her son that has haunted her. She sees him bloodied, crawling and crying for her after being shot in the head. She said she cannot help but try to imagine her son Edgar today. He would be a high school senior, no longer a boy. She ought to be looking forward to his graduation, she said, not the day that his killers die.

“I just want to have him to hold and to hug and to love,” she said. “I want my son back. That was my flesh and blood.”

As night fell on Wilson Avenue in the neighborhood where the shootings took place three years ago, there were few trick-or-treaters to be found.

Maria Zazueta led her 3- and 5-year-old daughters by the hand--only the older one was in costume, dressed as a clown. She stopped in front of a tan, clapboard bungalow with a lemon tree in front and pointed to a patch of sidewalk.

“That’s where those boys were killed . . . right there,” she said. “And that’s why we’re out so early. Every Halloween since that shooting I’ve taken my kids out in the afternoon. We make sure to get home before dark.”

Victor Montez, who lives in an apartment nearby, said the Halloween after the shooting not one trick-or-treater stopped by his home for candy. Last year only two stopped by the entire night.

“We used to get a lot of kids, but the shooting just scared them off,” he said.

Times staff writers Nora Zamichow and Miles Corwin contributed to this story.

* MOTHER’S REACTION: “My son’s killers deserve to die,” grieving mother says. B1