Lancaster Slaying Victim Had Feared a Racial Attack

Sleeping in an empty lot behind a McDonald’s, Milton Walker Jr. probably seemed like the kind of person no one would miss.

The sometime mechanic and longtime drunk was living on the dole. Unable to afford both the bottle and a bed, and too proud to ask a friend for help, he finally abandoned the semblance of home offered by rented rooms for full-time street life in November 1995.

It was a dangerous time to make that choice, and Walker knew it.

“He was afraid,” said Doris Clay, one of a group of friends, including Walker, who moved from Los Angeles to Lancaster in the early 1990s looking for a better life.

“He didn’t want to be nowhere after dark. He said there’s a lot of skinheads over there and they were bad,” she said. “He said a lot of his friends were getting beaten up. He said it happened every day.”

Two days after Thanksgiving, authorities said, it happened to Walker.

Three admitted white supremacists went out that Saturday night looking for someone to kill, prosecutors said. They found Walker in that vacant lot and allegedly beat him to death with a stick.

A worker dumping garbage found Walker, but told detectives he was too afraid to get near him to offer help. He called security guards. They called 911.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office determined that Walker, 43, died of “assault.” He had been beaten to death.

At the time, detectives had no clue who killed him or why.

“The sheriff’s office had a standard murder case. They do the standard investigation and they come up with no witnesses. Case closed. It’s all over with,” said Gary Auer, who heads the FBI component of the Antelope Valley Hate Crimes Task Force.

It took two years for investigators to arrest the people they say killed Walker.

Last week, Los Angeles prosecutors charged three white supremacists--two of whom already have been convicted of violent hate crimes--in Walker’s killing.

Under normal circumstances, Walker’s death might have gone unsolved.

But a wave of racial violence in the Antelope Valley caught the attention of local and federal investigators.

They cased neighborhoods and questioned local skinheads about the beatings, stabbing and shooting of several minorities by white youths, some shouting “white power.”

And in the course of one such interview in May last year, a source told federal agents that some skinheads had killed a black homeless man, according to Auer.

After trips to the morgue and a search of police files, agents found the report on Walker’s death.

Then they had to search for witnesses. Homeless witnesses.

“Many of the witnesses were not you or I driving by, having some confidence in the judiciary and the police,” said John Spillane, head deputy in the Antelope Valley Branch of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. “It’s unfortunate, but they might have relatively minor things themselves and they fear if they go in, they’ll get arrested for their own personal problems. Or they might have thought: Who’s going to believe them? They’re homeless.”

Eventually, investigators found some drifters who saw something that night.

“A couple of detectives gave me a call,” said Steve Baker, director of Grace Ministries food bank in Lancaster. “They were looking for two guys who witnessed it that were clients of ours. I don’t open my records to just anyone, but the names were familiar at the time, so I gave them the phone numbers.”

Prosecutors and investigators won’t say much more about what happened in nearly 18 months of investigation leading to last week’s arrests, contending it would harm their case.

They say only that Randall “Randy” Lee Rojas, Ritch Bryant and a teenage girl, whom prosecutors have refused to identify, killed Walker because he was black. They say they can prove it, but they won’t say how.

They also say it wasn’t the first time either man had cruised Lancaster’s streets, looking for minorities to attack.

Rojas and Bryant already have been sentenced to prison for hate crimes.

They were among white supremacists who for months terrorized minorities in the Antelope Valley, leading to its designation by officials as one of Los Angeles County’s four “hate-crime clusters.”

How the three developed their alleged violent anti-minority bent is unclear. But there’s no question what they believed.

Bryant wears an “SS” tattoo on his left arm and told officials that he subscribed to “Aryan beliefs.”

Rojas has said that although his father is Mexican, he believes in “white pride.” His tattoos include “white” on his ankles, “white power” across both arms and, above his kneecaps, shaded lightning bolts, which “are indicative of one who has killed an individual,” according to court files.

Both started stealing and skipping school at a young age. Bryant told authorities he started drinking whiskey and beer when he was 11 and used LSD “a lot.”

He’d been through Juvenile Hall, placement in a juvenile program and probation by the time he had reached his mid-teens.

He was 16 when he and Rojas started committing violent hate crimes. Or at least started getting caught.

Rojas was one of five or six skinheads who attacked a young Latino man, David Wilkerson, outside a 7-Eleven in October 1995 as Wilkerson sat on the curb, waiting for a friend to get off work.

They asked him if he was “down for white pride.” When Wilkerson replied that he was Mexican, Rojas and the others beat him up and ran away.

It was about that time that Walker became worried about walking Lancaster’s streets at night, telling his friend Clay that skinheads were on the prowl.

“They were beating them up because they don’t have no place to stay, nowhere to run,” she said. “I wish to God he would have told me he had no place to stay, I would have found something.”

Clay said she had met Walker through some friends in Los Angeles about 1991 and that they all later moved to Lancaster. Most of the group had moved away by 1995, and Walker became closer to Clay.

“I believe I was his keeper,” Clay said. “I liked him a lot, and I guess he felt that I was somebody that he could rely on.”

She said she would hire him for odd jobs around the house and to work on her car. At times, he gave her his food stamps so she could buy and cook meals for him.

He gave Clay’s address and telephone number to relatives and officials as his own. She would hold the occasional letters that came from his sisters or daughter in Texas, and would take messages from them when they called.

He cleaned up at a rehab center about January 1995, but by July he was drinking again, she said. By November, he was skinny and unshaven, and although he wouldn’t admit it to her, he was living on the street.

The last day she saw him was just before Thanksgiving. He was helping her clean up the yard, but he used money she gave him and started drinking before he was done working.

“He was actually happy that day. Smiling and joking,” she said. “I asked him: ‘Are you drinking?’ and he smiled and said: ‘A man deserves to drink every once in a while.’ ”

He called her on Thanksgiving. She told him to come over and eat, but he said he’d just had a nice meal. Maybe he’d come over on Saturday. He said he’d call. He never did.

On Sunday, police came to tell her he had been slain.

“He was a kindhearted person. I don’t believe he deserved to die that way,” she said.

At the time of the killing, Bryant was on juvenile probation, living at a girlfriend’s house and, he told authorities, selling drugs to make a living.

Walker’s slaying had not been classified as a hate crime, so Bryant, who was not then a suspect, kept hanging out with skinheads and picking fights, prosecutors said.

In December that year, he and half a dozen other skinheads beat and stabbed an African American student who was crossing the Antelope Valley High School baseball field one morning on his way to class.

Rojas moved to Washington state. His defense lawyer later said he left town to start a new life and had gotten a job at a fast-food restaurant.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carla Arranaga said Rojas left town because of Walker’s slaying.

In February 1996, Bryant was charged with attempted murder in the Antelope Valley High School stabbing. The crime so outraged authorities that Bryant was tried as an adult.

“If you want me to say I’m sorry, I won’t,” he told a probation officer after pleading guilty to assault with a deadly weapon in August 1996. “The victim got what he deserved.”

He said the beating was not a hate crime, just something that “got out of hand.”

The probation officer recommended Bryant be locked up “for as long as possible.”

He was sentenced to eight years and sent to Ironwood State Prison.

Rojas and two others were eventually arrested in the 7-Eleven beating when a witness recognized one of them and followed him home, court documents show. After pleading guilty, they were sentenced in March to two years in prison.

By then, investigators suspected Rojas in Walker’s killing but didn’t have enough proof to bring charges, said Spillane, the prosecutor.

He won’t say what they found in the interim that bolstered the case, other than that “more people talked” after Rojas and Bryant were imprisoned.

Clay said she’s not angry at Walker’s alleged attackers. She feels sorry for them.

“How can they find that hatred in their hearts at such a young age? They didn’t even enjoy life and now they’re going to spend it in prison,” she said. “They’re so young to be so wrong.”