White Supremacist Gets Life in Prison Without Parole

His head freshly shaved, wearing a blue and white jail uniform and slouching in his chair, an avowed white supremacist was condemned Monday to spend the rest of his life in prison for beating a black homeless man to death to earn lightning bolt tattoos.

Asked by the judge whether he had anything to say before he was sentenced, Ritch Briant, 20, replied: “What is there to say? Do whatever you’ve got to do.”

Briant, a member of the Lancaster white supremacist group Nazi Low Riders, was one of three skinheads convicted of killing 43-year-old Milton Walker Jr. two days after Thanksgiving 1995. Prosecutors said it was the first murder case of its kind in memory.

On Monday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lance Ito sentenced Briant to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus five years for additional allegations.

“We just feel like this is the best Thanksgiving present we’ve had in a long time,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jacquelyn Lacey said. “We are just thrilled to be telling him goodbye and seeing him get put away forever.”

Briant made two requests through his attorney: that his name, which for years has been misspelled in court records as Bryant, be corrected, and that he be sent to prison to begin his sentence as soon as possible.

Briant was alone. No supporters, and none of his relatives were present.

During a telephone interview Monday, a sister who still lives in Lancaster said Briant was brought up in a racist home, hung around with the wrong crowd and was constantly in trouble simply because he had nothing else to do.

“He doesn’t deserve to go away forever,” said Heather Briant, 23, as she sobbed into the telephone. “It’s not even his fault. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

She said she knew Walker, whom she described as a “crazy bum” who would scream gibberish at anyone who stepped into his turf, which he marked with lines of rocks in the vacant lot where he lived.

Walker’s killing was not Briant’s first crime or even his only race-related crime, however. According to court documents, he was arrested seven times between the ages of 12 and 16 on charges ranging from theft to battery to cruelty to animals.

In December 1995, he was one of five or six juveniles who beat and stabbed a black student in the baseball field at Antelope Valley High School. Although he was only 16, he was treated as an adult, was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison, which Ito said he must complete before beginning his current life sentence.

A month earlier, on Nov. 25, 1995, Briant, Randy Rojas, 24, and another man, who testified via videotape against his former friends and is being prosecuted separately on lesser charges, attacked Walker after a white homeless woman told them Walker had kicked her. Rojas repeatedly beat Walker with a board, as Briant egged him on.

Later Briant insisted on returning to finish Walker off so he could earn lightning bolt tattoos, a status symbol in their Lancaster skinhead circle which investigators said at the time could be earned only by killing a minority. He took Jessica Colwell, then 16, with him.

During that second trip, Briant beat the bloody, motionless man with a board while Colwell hit him with a metal pipe.

All of the defendants confessed to having hit Walker, although minimizing their roles. None testified during the trial, which focused mainly on expert testimony about the time of death.

Because Walker was beaten twice that night by different defendants, each claimed the others were really responsible for his death.

Rojas was convicted of premeditated, race-motivated murder and also faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole at his sentencing hearing today.

Colwell was convicted of the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter, in part because jurors said they had no firm evidence that she caused any of the fatal blows. At her sentencing hearing Wednesday, Colwell faces a maximum of nine years in prison.

During Monday’s hearing, prosecutors dropped another case against Briant, for allegedly bringing a makeshift knife into the courthouse. Authorities said he had planned to use it against the investigators or the head of the district attorney’s Hate Crime Suppression Unit.

Lacey, the prosecutor, said that crime and even Monday’s shaved head were signs of Briant’s violent, aggressive attitude.

“To me, it was the equivalent of if you were in the electric chair and you gave your victim’s family and everybody else the finger,” Lacey said. “That’s what he did to us with his shaved head. He gave us the finger.”