2nd Racist Gets Life for Murder

Moments before he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for beating a homeless man to death because he was black, a tattoo-covered skinhead used his final opportunity to insult the men and women who prosecuted him.

Randall Lee Rojas, 24, spat out obscenities at the FBI agent and prosecutor sitting across from him during the short sentencing hearing in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday.

He then looked back at his mother, who sat in the audience wearing a wide grin and bobbing her head in apparent agreement at her son’s words, her eyes locked on the investigators.

Rojas, who rejects his father’s Mexican heritage, was one of three white supremacists convicted of the beating death of Milton Walker Jr. nearly four years ago.

An avowed racist who belonged to the high desert Nazi Low Rider white supremacist group, Rojas was the principal aggressor in the killing, repeatedly beating the 43-year-old victim with a board, knocking him unconscious and continuing to smash his face in as he lay motionless in the dirt.

“I see him as the major executioner in this case,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jacquelyn Lacey. “In light of his bad attitude, I’m glad he’s going away for life, rather than getting out someday.”

Like Ritch Briant, 20, a co-defendant sentenced for the same crime a day earlier, Rojas wore his County Jail uniform Tuesday and displayed a recently shaved head, shedding the gentle demeanor, collegiate attire and long, slicked-back hair he had presented to the jury.

And like his co-defendant before him, Rojas was sentenced by Judge Lance Ito to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the race-motivated killing, plus five years for additional offenses.

As a sheriff’s deputy escorted Rojas to the lockup after Tuesday’s hearing, he and his mother called out a final “I love you” to each other.

Then, with the tone of a mother sending a young child off to summer camp, she added: “Call me as soon as you get there.”

She declined further comment.

Jessica Colwell, 20, a third defendant who also beat Walker but was convicted of the lesser crime of race-related involuntary manslaughter, is scheduled to be sentenced today. She faces a maximum of nine years in prison.

According to testimony during the monthlong trial, Rojas, Briant and a third man who cooperated with authorities and is being tried separately on lesser charges, attacked the victim after encountering a white woman on the street who told them Walker had kicked her.

Rojas repeatedly beat Walker, was pulled away by one of his friends, then broke free, ran up to Walker and kicked his head “like a football.”

During the trial, his lawyer claimed Rojas left the man alive and that Briant and Colwell delivered the fatal blows when they returned and continued to beat the bleeding, unconscious man with a board and a pipe.

It was not Rojas’ first violent, race-related crime.

In September 1995, he was among a group of skinheads who punched and kicked a young Latino man at a Lancaster convenience store while shouting obscenities and racial epithets.

He pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to two years in prison in 1997. At the time, he told a probation officer that he “did the crime and was willing to do the time.”

“He viewed the investigation as a wake-up call,” the probation officer wrote in the report, “and he was going to rethink his views to avoid getting into further trouble.”