Woman Given 9 Years in Beating Death of Homeless Man

A woman who as a teenager helped beat a homeless man to death because of the color of his skin was sentenced to the maximum nine years in prison Wednesday after declaring racism “totally disgusting and stupid.”

“I would like to thank the jury people--they know who they are,” said the woman, Jessica Colwell, 20, during the short hearing. “They were so fair and I owe them a lot, especially the black jurors who could have held a grudge and put that aside. They saved my life.”

Her co-defendants Randall Rojas, 24, and Ritch Briant, 20, have already been found guilty of premeditated, race-related first-degree murder in separate trials, for which they were both sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutors sought the same penalty for Colwell, but an all-minority jury decided she did not intend to kill the victim and instead convicted her of the lesser crime of race-motivated involuntary manslaughter.

Colwell could be released as early as 2001.

“I’m confident that had she been a guy, they wouldn’t have cut her much of a break,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jacquelyn Lacey said of the jurors. “I’m happy that the judge gave her the max. I’m sorry she didn’t go away for more.”

Four years ago today, Rojas and another man--who testified against his friends and is being tried separately on lesser charges--attacked Milton Walker Jr. in the Lancaster vacant lot where he lived.

According to testimony, after Rojas repeatedly smashed the victim’s face with a stick--leaving him bloody, broken and unconscious--Colwell returned to the scene with Briant, who wanted to finish him off to earn the right to wear lightning bolt tattoos from the local white supremacist group, the Nazi Low Riders.

As Walker lay motionless in the dirt, Colwell--who was 16 at the time--hit him with a pipe and a stick.

Colwell bragged about the attack to friends and eventually confessed to her mother and authorities, saying she had returned out of morbid curiosity and thought Walker was dead when she hit him.

“The idea that a 16-year-old would pick up a pipe and hit him in the head, in the place where he had already been compromised, is unspeakable,” Lacey said. “It says to me she has a heart that is so cruel and so black and so dark that it cannot be rehabilitated.”

None of the defendants testified during the trial, in which three separate juries decided each defendant’s fate.

Faced with uncertainties over the time of death, and with no evidence that the fatal wounds had been inflicted by the pipe, Colwell’s weapon, jurors said they could not find beyond a reasonable doubt that she had intended to kill.

They said they had no choice but to convict her of the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter, even though some jurors said they thought she deserved worse.

The juries found that all of the defendants acted out of racial hate and were associated with the racist Lancaster Nazi Low Riders group, which worked to rid the High Desert of non-whites. Each defendant is part Latino.

Authorities said Colwell was among a group of teens who attacked a mixed-race couple in a Lancaster park and threatened to blow up a coffee shop that served minorities.

But on Wednesday, Colwell decried racism and complained that media reports about the case have resulted in her getting letters from “skinheads I don’t even know. They think I’m some kind of hero.”

Her short address to Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lance Ito contained no words of remorse or contrition, only criticism of her accusers and the media, praise of the judge and jury and relief that she will walk out of prison a very young woman.

“It was a mercy verdict. I am totally blissed out by the verdict,” Colwell said, chains wrapped around the waist of her oversized blue prison jumpsuit, her long dark brown hair hanging in twin braids. “I’m glad it’s over with and this man can rest in peace.”