Supremacist Convicted of Racial Killing

A Lancaster skinhead who beat a homeless man to death with a board because of the color of his skin was convicted Thursday of premeditated, racially motivated murder, guaranteeing him a lifetime in prison.

The verdict, which prosecutors said marked the first time in memory that a jury in Los Angeles County has convicted anyone of a racially motivated killing, came one day after a Wyoming man was convicted of beating a gay man to death.

Los Angeles jurors said they were persuaded to convict Randall Lee Rojas because of his membership in the Nazi Low Riders--a white supremacist group--and his stated desire to kill a member of a racial minority, as well as diary entries he made about eradicating nonwhites.

“My personal thought was that he was looking for an opportunity to kill a minority and here was a great opportunity,” said juror Fred Totten, 50, of Hancock Park. “Here was a black man who was vulnerable.”

Two other juries are still deliberating the fate of Rojas’ co-defendants, Ritch Bryant and Jessica Colwell, who prosecutors say further beat Milton Walker Jr. with a stick and board, hastening his death. Defense lawyers say Walker was already dead when Bryant and Colwell got there.

“That’s very encouraging,” Geraldine Washington, president of the NAACP in Los Angeles, said of the verdict. “I think it sends a message to anybody who even thinks about committing a hate or racial crime that society is not going to take these things lightly and people are going to pay for their crimes. Enough is enough.”

The courtroom was otherwise silent as the clerk read the verdicts. None of Rojas’ family members was present, and the defendant--wearing his dark hair slicked back, khaki pants and a blue and white striped oxford shirt--did not react.

As the jurors trailed out of the courtroom, one, a black woman, gave a thumbs-up to the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jacquelyn Lacey.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance Ito, who also presided over the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson, has issued a gag order prohibiting the lawyers and investigators from commenting on the Walker case.

“I apologize for having to subject you to this type of case,” Ito told the jurors before excusing them. “It was a heavy burden you had to carry.”

On Nov. 25, 1995, reputed white supremacists Rojas and Michael Thornton, who testified for the prosecution and is being prosecuted separately on lesser charges, beat and kicked Walker after a white woman complained that Walker had kicked her.

According to testimony, Rojas smashed Walker in the head with a board and continued to hit and kick him after he lay motionless on the ground as Bryant encouraged him with racial slurs.

They left him bleeding but alive, prosecutors said.

Bryant, however, returned with Colwell, checked Walker’s pulse, and--finding him alive--the pair beat him with the same weathered wooden board and a length of pipe, prosecutors said.

Authorities had no suspects in the killing for months, until an avowed skinhead who was charged with Bryant in the unrelated stabbing of a black student at Antelope Valley High School tipped off federal agents.

“We thought that they thought they weren’t going to get caught,” said Totten, one of five white jurors on the panel that included blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans.

“I think it’s important to show that every person’s life is valuable. You can be homeless, you can be a drunkard, but still you can’t kill that person and get away with it,” Totten said.

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During the trial, Rojas’ lawyer, Donald Calabria, argued that the beating was a spur-of-the-moment act without the malicious intent needed for a conviction of first-degree murder. He also argued that Walker was alive when Rojas left, and it was really Bryant and Colwell who killed him.

None of the defendants took the stand during trial, and the defense was principally one of medical experts battling over the cause of death.

Only one expert, who was hired by Colwell, said the victim had to have died during the first attack. The others said it was unclear how long he’d lived, that he could have lingered for hours.

Lacey, the prosecutor, relied heavily on the testimony of a medical examiner who said Walker suffered no post-mortem wounds, suggesting he must still have been alive when Bryant and Colwell beat him the second time. The doctor also testified that all of the blows to the face, which broke his nose and upper and lower jawbones and damaged his brain, contributed to Walker’s death.

Walker’s killing marked the worst incident in a wave of white-supremacist violence against minorities in the desert community that peaked in 1995.

Both Bryant and Rojas were convicted of committing other violent crimes against minorities that year.

Bryant is serving an eight-year state prison term for the September 1995 high school stabbing. Rojas served a two-year prison sentence for the beating of a Latino outside a minimarket a month after Walker’s murder.

Colwell allegedly was among a group of skinheads who attacked a mixed-race couple in a Lancaster park that same year and also allegedly threatened to blow up a Lancaster coffee shop because it served blacks.

Authorities say Bryant, Rojas and Colwell were all associates of the Nazi Low Rider gang, reportedly the fastest-growing white-supremacist group in the country.

Jack Schaefer, a special agent with the FBI who since 1992 has investigated hate crimes in the High Desert, said the defendants and their pals were fiercely racist and aspired to run all nonwhites out of Lancaster in the short term and out of America in the long term.

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After Walker’s death, authorities say both Rojas and Bryant got lightning bolts tattooed on their arms, a “badge of courage” that must be earned by killing a minority.

“It’s clear that race was a significant, if not the biggest, motive which led to the first strike,” said the jury foreman, a 32-year-old civil lawyer from Playa del Rey who did not want his name published. “We pretty much agreed that if [the victim] was a white person, this probably wouldn’t have happened.”