Slain Youth Buried as Questions Linger

Hundreds of mourners came to a sun-glazed hillside Friday to bury 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz and listen to the words of the rabbi:

“There are deaths such as this when we can’t shake an angry finger at God and say, ‘Why?’ We can only look to ourselves.”

Rabbi James Lee Kaufman seemed to get to the heart of a mystery that police consider solved--one suspect has confessed--but that no one may ever truly comprehend.

How did a 15-year-old boy come to be bound and shot in a grave allegedly dug by the friends of his older half brother? How did a bunch of adolescent baseball players grow into adults accused of kidnapping and murder? How did parents, including a father at the house where Markowitz was allegedly held for two days before he was killed, fail to see the signs of impending tragedy?

Authorities investigating Markowitz’s death on Aug. 8 in the rugged hills north of Santa Barbara don’t yet have all the answers. But they have enough to have charged four young men with murder and kidnapping, including three who had played in the same San Fernando Valley youth baseball league with Benjamin Markowitz, 22, Nick’s half brother.

One of the suspects confessed to helping kidnap the victim from his West Hills neighborhood, according to court papers filed Friday. After walking the boy up a rugged trail two days later, the suspect said, a companion shot Markowitz as he lay in a makeshift grave beneath a manzanita bush.

On Friday, about 300 people, perhaps half of them teenagers, packed the chapel at Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills for the boy’s funeral and then trudged up a grassy hill in 90-degree heat to witness his burial.

Six young pallbearers carried the casket, three of them weeping.

The victim would have been a junior at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills this fall. “He always made me laugh,” said 16-year-old Elizabeth Harless of Chatsworth. Even when I was mad at him, I couldn’t stay mad for long.”

One 17-year-old friend who declined to be identified said: “You wake up and realize that all the drug dealing has to stop, because a nice guy like Nick had to die.”

On its surface, the crime was apparently straightforward, if unusually coldblooded.

According to sheriff’s investigators in Santa Barbara, the victim was kidnapped Aug. 6 by five young men to put pressure on Benjamin Markowitz. Investigators said the older Markowitz told them he owed one of the suspects, Jesse James Hollywood, $36,000 for marijuana. It’s unclear if Markowitz was selling drugs.

“It’s my fault that my 15-year-old brother’s dead,” Benjamin Markowitz said in an interview Friday with KNBC-TV Channel 4, although he maintained that he owed Hollywood only $1,200.

Eyes welling with tears, he said he had known the suspects since childhood. “I mean, I couldn’t even fathom anyone doing that, especially people that I grew up with, laughed with, cried with,” he said. “I mean, these are, like, my friends.”

He did not attend the funeral, out of respect for his stepmother, Susan Markowitz.

“I expect her to just reach across the table and wring my neck,” he said. “I wish it was me. I wish I was the one that was gone.”

Drugs were apparently common to the group of friends. Even Nick Markowitz had been caught with marijuana at his former school, Chatsworth High, apparently forcing his transfer to El Camino, according to Santa Barbara sheriff’s officials.

On Aug. 6 the victim was taken to the Santa Barbara home of Barron Rugge, the father of one of the suspects. Rugge, who manages a greenhouse at UC Santa Barbara, told The Times that he thought the youth was a guest of his son and that the younger boy showed no signs of being held against his will during the two days he was there.

The suspects believed that they would face kidnapping charges if they released the younger Markowitz, authorities said, so they decided to kill him.

Driving into the mountains that sweep up north of Santa Barbara, three of the suspects--Ryan James Hoyt, 21, of West Hills; Jesse Taylor Rugge, 20, of Santa Barbara; and Graham Pressley, 17, of Goleta--parked alongside a popular trail that is known as a party spot among area teenagers, authorities said.

4 Suspects’ Arraignments Delayed

A fourth suspect, William Skidmore, 20, of Simi Valley, and Hollywood, who remains at large, were not at the murder scene, authorities said.

Markowitz’s hands were bound with duct tape, and he was allegedly forced to walk about a mile along the rugged dirt trail, around boulders and past thick stands of brush, until he reached the spot where the suspects had dug his grave beneath an overarching manzanita bush. An eight-foot boulder nearby provided an accidental gravestone.

Only Hoyt and Rugge accompanied Markowitz, investigators said, and Pressley stayed behind in the car. Authorities said they believe Hoyt then fired the nine shots into Markowitz’s the head and torso from a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun, stopping only after it jammed. Then he is believed to have thrown the gun on top of Markowitz, who he then covered with dirt. Hikers noticed an odor a few days later, leading to the discovery of the body.

On Friday, a bright orange X painted by sheriff’s investigators, marked the boulder, and the smell of death still hung in the air.

Four of the five suspects appeared briefly in court Friday and, at the request of their court-appointed lawyers, had their arraignments delayed to next Friday.

The fifth, Hollywood, 20, of West Hills, remained a fugitive, authorities said.

Four suspects have been charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. Pressley was charged as an adult. According to a sheriff’s statement in the court file, Rugge “admitted that he assisted” in the kidnapping and was present when a “co-suspect” killed Markowitz.

Among those in court were Rugge’s parents, Barron and Melissa Rugge, and a couple who appeared to be Pressley’s parents. All were distraught; none would comment on the charges against their sons. Barron Rugge had previously described himself as “emotionally crushed” by the charges.

Authorities said the TEC-9 gun used in the killing is registered to an owner in Mesa, Ariz. They declined to say how the gun came to be in the possession of the killer.

Nor could they answer the deeper questions, which were left for parents and friends of the victim and the suspects. Some seemed strangely disconnected from the crime.

Ryan Gunches, who played baseball with Hollywood at El Camino Real, said he had been a friend of Hollywood and Nick Markowitz for years. He lived near the victim and saw Hollywood as recently as 10 days ago, he said.

“Jesse, like, never took anything seriously. He was always mellow,” Gunches said. “It’s weird, because I know the victim and the people who did it too. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, but I’m not going to ever forget it either. It will always be in my head. It’s just too weird.”

The last time he saw Hollywood, he said, “he was cool as usual. He was always cool with me. He wasn’t like some guy plotting to kill someone.”

Vicky Hoyt was insistent that her son, Ryan, was “loving, kind [and] sweet,” not the sort of person who could have committed murder.

When she spoke to him after his arrest, she said: “He was laughing. He said he did not do this crime. He’s not capable of it. My family will vouch for him; his father will.”

Vicky Hoyt said she read a comment by Susan Markowitz in Friday’s Times in which the victim’s mother said: “I wouldn’t want to be the parents of the person that took my baby’s life. I would not be able to live with myself. My situation is better than theirs.”

“Well,” Hoyt said, “my situation is better than theirs. My son did not do this.”

She added that she was grieving “because my son does not belong in jail and I feel so, so, so sad, and I am sorry for their loss.”

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Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein, Tina Dirmann, Margaret Talev, Martha A. Willman, Karima A. Haynes and Zanto Peabody and Times Community News reporters Catherine Blake and Gail Davis contributed to this story.