Jurors Told of Lancaster Racial Attack

Testifying Wednesday via videotape, Michael A. Thornton told jurors he and one of his white supremacist friends beat an unarmed homeless man because he was black.

Thornton, the key witness in the Lancaster murder case, said he threw the first punch but then tried to stop Randall Rojas from attacking the man with a board.

“I can’t hold it in me no longer,” Thornton said, according to a transcript of the tape. “It is tearing my whole soul apart, ripping my family apart. It totally screwed my life up, and I need to get it out so I can maybe get on with my life.”

He said Milton Walker Jr. did not fight back after Rojas knocked him to the ground and repeatedly pounded his head.

Prosecutors allege that Rojas, 24, and two friends, Ritch Bryant and Jessica Colwell, both 20, killed Walker out of racial hatred. The 43-year-old victim was beaten twice on the night he died, and much of the case turns on the exact time of death.

The videotaped testimony was taken last year while Thornton was cooperating with prosecutors. He was given limited immunity, and has been charged with assault in the 1995 attack. Since then, he has refused to testify, citing his right not to incriminate himself.

The trio of young defendants watched silently as Thornton, his pale face projected onto a screen a few feet away, related his version of the November night that could send them to prison for life with no possibility of parole. Three separate juries are hearing the case.

“I ran over toward Randy and gave him a bear hug and got him away from the man,” Thornton testified. His dark hair, grown out from the shaved look he favored as a skinhead, brushed the collar of his white, short-sleeved shirt as he slowly told his story.

He said he intervened in the beating because “You don’t hit people like that.” After Rojas struck Walker’s head, swinging the board like “a baseball bat,” the victim collapsed and did not move again, Thornton testified. He said Bryant rooted Rojas on, saying, “Get that [racial epithet].”

The defense has denied the attack was motivated by racial hatred. Each defense attorney has also suggested defendants other than his client may be responsible.

Only a portion of the videotape was shown Wednesday. Thornton, who was 16 at the time of the killing, said he “shared the same views at the time” as the defendants.

Thornton testified that he, Rojas, and Bryant were walking when they ran into a white woman who said she had just had an argument with Walker, who she said kicked her.

The trio headed to the dusty vacant lot behind a strip mall to find Walker. As they approached the transient, Thornton said, he was arguing with a white man.

“We saw one man, the black guy, push the white guy down to the ground,” he testified. Thornton said he led the charge, heading through a break in the fence to confront Walker.

“I walked up to the black guy. I said, ‘Did you hit that woman back there?’ And before he replied I kicked him and then I punched him,” Thornton said.

Prosectors say that Bryant and Colwell later returned to the scene and beat Walker a second time.

Thornton testified that after he, Rojas and Bryant left the victim sprawled on the ground after the first beating, Bryant repeatedly said he wanted to go back and kill the man, so that he could earn his “bolts”--lightning bolt tattoos indicating, in some white supremacist circles, that the bearer has killed a minority.

The tape showed that under cross-examination by Bryant’s lawyer, Norman Kallen, Thornton said he did not think Walker was dead when the teens left him after the initial attack.