After 10 Years, Compton Still Remembers 2 Slain Officers

As they have for 10 years, young and old officers arrived in Compton on Saturday night to honor two of their own murdered on a rain-slick night in 1993.

More than 100 former Compton police officers, many retired or now working at other departments, joined residents and family members to remember Officers Kevin Michael Burrell, 29, and James Wayne MacDonald, 23, who were killed on Feb. 22, 1993, during a traffic stop at Rosecrans and Dwight avenues -- the site of Saturday’s vigil.

Participants held candles, prayed and cried. They also reinforced old bonds severed when the Compton Police Department disbanded.

“In a way, the more they spread us apart, the more they kept us together,” said Tim Brennan, a sheriff’s gang detective who, as a Compton police detective, helped investigate the officers’ murders.

The killings of the two officers by a gang member traumatized a police department that had never had an officer murdered in its 80-year history.

Compton Mayor Eric Perrodin, then a Compton police sergeant, recalled taking off the officers’ gun belts as they were ferried into the hospital.

“I still remember Kevin laying on the sidewalk on his back, Jimmy laying on the No. 1 lane. He was clearly dead. There was so much blood,” he said.

“I was field supervisor that night,” Perrodin said. “It was James’ last day. We were in the locker room getting dressed, and James asked if he could drive with Kevin because he had never driven with him before. I put them together that night.”

It was about 11 p.m. and the officers never had a chance, witnesses testified. Their killer, Regis Deon Thomas, 24, opened fire on the officers as they approached his pickup, bullets knocking them to the asphalt.

Under a steady rain, Thomas then pumped bullets into the officers’ heads. They were rushed to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, where they died a short time later. Thomas was arrested in San Pedro two months later. He was convicted and sentenced to death.