Steadfast Effort Against Hate

Milton Walker Jr.’s name might not be well known, but his 1995 beating death behind a Lancaster fast-food restaurant ranks in infamy alongside the more publicized murders last year of James Byrd Jr., the Texas man dragged behind a pickup truck driven by white supremacists, and Matthew Shepard, the college student lured from a gay bar, pistol-whipped and hung to die on a Wyoming fence.

Almost four years after Walker’s Thanksgiving weekend murder, two self-avowed skinheads were found guilty of killing the homeless man because he was black--the first time in memory a Los Angeles County jury convicted anyone of a racially motivated killing.

A third defendant, Jessica Colwell, 16 at the time of the murder, got off with a conviction for involuntary manslaughter after the jury could not be convinced that the metal pipe she admitted using to gouge Walker’s eye did not cause a fatal injury.

The beating, with a board and a pipe, left the victim’s face a bloodied pulp, broke his nose and jaw and crushed his skull. The defenses in the trials hinged not on whether the skinheads beat Walker but on when he died--within seconds or hours--and therefore which of the assailants delivered the fatal blows.

There were no such distinctions made after the attack when the two men who eventually were convicted both got lightning bolt tattoos--a badge allegedly conferred by the Nazi Low Riders, the white supremacist group to which they belonged, for killing a black man.

This was by far the ugliest, but not the only, hate crime committed in the Antelope Valley in the mid-1990s. It was in investigating other incidents, including shootings and cross burnings, that the FBI and county law enforcement agents finally got a tip on what otherwise might have been the never-solved murder of a forgotten homeless man.

That investigators and prosecutors persevered in bringing the three to trial is a credit to them and a much-needed signal to both the perpetrators and the victims of hate crimes that such mayhem will not be tolerated by a decent society, no matter how long it takes to see justice done. As with James Byrd and Matthew Shepard, a sad, proud legacy is left by the Milton Walker case.