Hate Crime Issue Will Be Focus of Trial

What happened to Milton Walker Jr. is plain enough: Two days after Thanksgiving 1995, the 43-year-old homeless man died in a vacant lot, his skull crushed by repeated blows.

To know who killed him and why, prosecutors say, is to delve into a world of bigotry and savagery and self-loathing, to peer into the small lives of a vicious group of young white supremacists at the peak of a hate-fueled crime rampage in the High Desert.

The slaying, authorities say, was a low point in a wave of violence and intimidation so severe that federal investigators stepped in to restore order in the Antelope Valley, a community labeled by at least two civil rights groups as a hotbed of racial hatred.

The three accused--two young men and a woman--face life in prison without the possibility of parole on charges of first-degree murder with the special circumstance that the slaying was racially motivated, one of only a handful of such killings in Los Angeles County history.

The three have pleaded not guilty to the crime, which their lawyers will argue is not race-related, according to court documents.

When trial begins this week, three juries will be asked to decide whether the three reputed white supremacists beat the life out of Walker behind a Lancaster restaurant because he was black.

Jurors will learn about a society of young people who cover their bodies with tattoos of storm troopers and “white power,” who, court records show, await a final “race war” by picking fights with minorities, primarily blacks, then boasting of those attacks. They will also hear how the skinheads’ fear of their own “Aryan brothers” leads to group violence.

“Basically, what they wanted to do was to intimidate and to use violence to give the opinion that Lancaster was not a safe place for minorities,” FBI agent Jack Schafer, who has investigated hate crimes in the Antelope Valley since 1993, testified at one hearing. “And if they continued their attacks on minorities, that minorities would no longer want to move into Lancaster and thus Lancaster would become an all-white community.”

In a perplexing twist, all three defendants are of mixed ethnicity. Randall Lee Rojas, 24, is half Latino and half white. Ritch Bryant, 20, is part Latino. Jessica Anne Colwell, also 20, has both Latino and Native American ancestry, Schafer said.

All three consider themselves white.

Authorities say the defendants, who shared a connection through the Nazi Low Rider gang, have taken part in other racially motivated beatings, threats and a stabbing, crimes that have sent Rojas and Bryant to prison on two- and eight-year sentences, respectively.

The proof that they killed Walker, according to court records, centers on the testimony of a former friend who threw the first punch, on the defendants’ boasting of the crime to friends, and on their statements to investigators admitting some involvement.

Because the victim was beaten twice, hours apart, and only one defendant is alleged to have been present both times, testimony about the exact time of death will be critical to determining who is responsible for the fatal blows.

While Deputy Dist. Atty. Jacquelyn Lacey is expected to call many witnesses to testify about the defendants’ racist beliefs, the defense appears poised to argue that, whatever their beliefs, they were not the motive behind their clients’ actions that night. Instead, those actions were the more banal consequence of the desire to protect others and, in one case, morbid curiosity.

“You had people that had a lot of hatred in them, but didn’t necessarily commit this crime because of their hate,” said Donald Calabria, Rojas’ lawyer, before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance Ito issued a gag order last week.

Ito will preside over all three cases; they will be tried at the same time before the three juries.

Altercation Preceded Man’s Death

“This wasn’t a midnight hunt for a black man,” Calabria added. “There were events that started it.”

According to court documents, testimony and interviews, this is how those events unfolded:

About 7 p.m. on Nov. 25, 1995, Rojas, Bryant and a third man were sitting on a sidewalk drinking Jack Daniels straight from the bottle.

A woman, who witnesses said had just had an argument with Walker, walked past. One of them asked her how she was doing.

“Not too [expletive] good,” the woman, who is white, reportedly replied. “Some [expletive] just kicked me in the back.”

Rojas, Bryant and Michael Thornton began walking in Walker’s direction. As they approached, they saw Walker push a smaller man, who also was white, to the ground. Thornton ran over.

“Did you hit that woman back there?” Thornton asked. Before Walker could reply, Thornton said, he kicked and punched Walker.

Walker began hurrying away, but Rojas allegedly caught up with him and smashed him in the head with a two-by-four, knocking him to the ground. As Bryant egged him on, Thornton said, Rojas repeatedly beat Walker in the face as he lay on the ground, immobile. All the while, Rojas allegedly called out racial slurs.

Thornton, who testified without immunity from prosecution, said he tried to pull Rojas off the victim because he “thought that was a bit much.” But Rojas broke free, he said, and kicked Walker in the head, “like you would kick a football.”

Thornton joined in the kicking because he said he was afraid he “might end up on the ground right next to him as a race traitor for protecting him.”

When the beating was over, the trio walked over to two men who were standing nearby, one white and one Latino, and shook their hands.

“We’re skinheads,” Rojas allegedly said by way of introduction.

The three tattoo-covered teenagers left, rejecting Bryant’s alleged request for them to finish off Walker.

Thornton said during a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles Municipal Court that Bryant wanted badly to kill a minority to “earn his bolts.” He wanted to bear the badge of courage of white supremacists, a lightning bolt tattoo that indicates the bearer has killed a minority, Thornton said.

According to her own statements to authorities and friends contained in court records, Colwell returned with Bryant to the vacant lot later that night. She told investigators she was just going to check on whether the victim was dead, the cornerstone of her defense.

Colwell admitted shoving a metal pipe in Walker’s eye and said Bryant repeatedly kicked him and beat him with a wooden stick, according to court records. She allegedly bragged to friends later that she thought she killed Walker because he “gurgled” when she “played with his eyeballs.”

“She didn’t really seem upset,” one teenager testified about Colwell’s confession to her. “You know, [it] didn’t seem really to matter.”

A coroner determined that Walker had sustained six to nine severe blows to the head, each of which alone could have been fatal and all of which were administered while he was alive, records show.

Tattoos of Lightning Bolts

After Colwell and Bryant left Walker, Colwell said, she accompanied Bryant to the house of a freelance tattoo artist. Johnie Gunderson, also a Lancaster resident, said he remembers Bryant waking him up about 11 p.m. the night of the slaying, wanting to get two lightning bolt tattoos.

“I said it was late and I was going back to bed,” testified Gunderson, who gave Bryant the tattoos a few weeks later. During court hearings, Thornton said Walker’s killing and the events that followed led him to examine his beliefs and finally reject them.

“Seeing that and [hearing] the sound of the board hitting the man, it clicked in my head that this was wrong,” Thornton said. “This is the wrong way to be.”

So he testified for prosecutors at a hearing last year, though he said telling the truth put his life in danger. Prosecutors agreed not to press murder charges, but then charged him with assault in the attack on Walker.

John Daley, Colwell’s attorney, suggests that Thornton’s remorse was either faked or short-lived. The lawyer said Thornton has been investigated by the Yuba County sheriff’s office for allegedly organizing local teenage skinheads.

Thornton’s cooperation ended last year, when prosecutors charged him with assault in his admitted attack on Walker. He is in custody, awaiting trial.

In a hearing last week, Thornton said he was exercising his right against self-incrimination and would no longer answer questions about Walker’s death. Ito decided that Thornton’s testimony will be read to jurors.