Son’s Brutal Death Torments Grieving Dad

Billy Zara’s father wants to remember all the wonderful things about his son. His easygoing spirit. His knack for making friends. His love of music.

Instead, he is haunted by the image of his 18-year-old son thrashing frantically for freedom while alleged gang members held him to the ground so others could kick, beat and stab him to death.

“I try to hold together in my mind how proud I was of him,” said Sam Zara, pausing to swallow back the tears filling his eyes. “But sometimes all I can see is how brutally he was killed. It was brutal.”

Sam Zara spoke Tuesday from his home in Ojai only hours after learning that eight people had been arrested on suspicion of murder in his son’s death. The suspects, identified by police as west Ventura gang members or gang associates, range in age from 14 to 36.

William Scott Zara died Sept. 26, a day after he was beaten in front of his Ventura apartment on East Warner Street in what police called an unprovoked attack. Police said the assailants believed it was Zara who called authorities to complain about noise at a party at their apartment across the street.

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But Zara’s friends and police say the teenager did not make the call. Instead, he was deeply involved in a video game on his Sega PlayStation and was still engaged when the assailants came pounding on his door.

Zara grabbed a baseball bat during the attack and held it up to defend himself, but the attackers used it instead to beat him about the head, police said. Before it was over, Zara had been struck with a shovel and fists, kicked in the head and stabbed. Several of Zara’s neighbors, who attempted to defend him, were also attacked.

“And this, this was a kid who just loved everybody,” Zara’s father said. “What they did to him is not something I can forgive. It was too cruel. We don’t do this to dogs. But these were adults who did this to a kid, to a kid. It was cruel, brutal, and the only word I have for it is ‘evil.’ ”

It was a violent end to the life of a young man known for his nonconfrontational demeanor, his father said.

Billy Zara’s passion in life was music. He loved all kinds of music, from local musicians to popular hits on the radio. His father often caught him blaring his favorite songs much too loud. But when the elder Zara complained, Billy Zara would pull his father aside and teach him about the band, explaining the words that came thundering from the speakers.

“Quite frankly, the words were no different than when I was a kid,” Zara said with a chuckle. “Only I guess nobody was listening, so now they say the same things only louder.”

The younger Zara also played bass guitar and once had a short-lived stint with a local band.

His fascination with music led to a job at the Ventura Theatre, where he worked helping other musicians set up for performances. He could often be seen carrying in band equipment. But his favorite task was illuminating the stage with a spotlight from the back of the theater.

Sam Zara had grown particularly close to his son in the last five years, after the boy moved back to Ventura after living in Arizona with his mother for many years. Sam Zara divorced Billy’s mother before their son was 2.

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The teenager moved in with his father and his father’s girlfriend, Kathy Russell, and began attending Pacific High School in Ventura, a continuation school for students with discipline and academic problems.

Money was especially tight then, Sam Zara said. He and his girlfriend lived in a tiny trailer struggling to make ends meet while training to become massage specialists. The little trailer was so small, there was simply nowhere for Billy Zara to sleep. So his father made a bedroom for his son in a camper shell on a pickup truck--cramped quarters they jokingly referred to as the “penthouse suite.”

“That time was so profound for me,” Zara said. “We didn’t have a lot of money for entertainment, so we worked with what little we had in that little trailer. . . . Birthdays, Christmas, all celebrations were in that trailer. There were a lot of laughs, and a lot of grimacing.”

Eventually finances improved and the family moved into a larger trailer, with room for all three of them.

But by the time he was 18, Billy Zara, who had struggled with education off and on, decided to quit school and try to “step out and see what life had to offer,” Sam Zara said.

Aside from his job at the theater, Zara worked for a jewelry company in Santa Barbara where he helped design necklaces, bracelets and earrings. He immersed himself in the work, his father said.

“His last paycheck had 49 hours on it,” Zara said. “That’s how hard he worked.”

Still, the elder Zara wanted his son to return to school. He talked to him about eventually attending college and taking some anatomy classes so that his father could teach him to become a massage specialist. The hope, Sam Zara said, was that one day he and his son would be in business together.

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Zara didn’t know until the morning of his son’s death how seriously the boy had taken his father’s words. Sam Zara discovered an application to Ventura College on his son’s bed.

“His friends said he wanted to get his GED and go to college,” Zara recalled Tuesday in a voice strained with emotion. “They said he wanted to work with me.”

Zara was home asleep when two of his son’s best friends tapped on his bedroom window with news that the boy was critically injured and in the hospital. By the time he made it to his son’s bedside, the teenager was still alive but his eyes were fixed and dilated, Zara said.

“And I knew,” Zara said. “I looked at him and I knew.”

Zara said he decided to turn off the life support that kept his son’s heart beating and to donate his organs.

“Bill would have wanted it that way,” Zara said. “Bill aided a lot of people in his life, and this way he could still help them. That’s what he was all about.”

After hearing of the arrests, Zara lit a candle next to an 8-by-10 photo of his son. A candle, he said, will stay lit until his son’s attackers are brought to justice.

“For me, I’m still in total shock,” Zara said. “I haven’t even quite grasped yet that he’s gone.”