Teen to Be Tried as Adult in Hate Crime

Hours after they murdered a homeless man because of the color of his skin, two white supremacists celebrated by planning to get lightning bolts tattooed on their upper arms, prosecutors said Friday. A badge of courage among white supremacists, the bolts represent the slaying of a minority.

The details of the crime, which occurred more than two years ago, came to light for the first time in a hearing in Sylmar Juvenile Court to determine whether Jessica Ann Colwell should be tried as an adult in the slaying of Milton Walker Jr.

She was 16 in November 1995, when authorities say she and two other white supremacists beat Walker to death. The next day, investigators said, Colwell bragged about the slaying to a friend.

FBI Special Agent Jack Schafer said Colwell told at least two people that she killed Walker, beating him with a chrome pipe and shoving the pipe into his eye. In one case she allegedly boasted of having “played with his eyeballs.”

A psychologist consulted by Colwell’s defense lawyer said the teen could be rehabilitated in a juvenile setting, contending her white supremacist beliefs were part of the natural adolescent search for identity. Colwell is half-Native American.

But Juvenile Court Judge Morton Rochman remanded her to adult court, noting that she showed no remorse for the “revolting” crime. She did not react to the decision or to many of the accusations against her.

For much of the hearing, Colwell, now 18, sat slouched in her chair, looking directly at Rochman. With her confident air, manicured nails, wire-rimmed glasses and long brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail, she looked more like a college student than a juvenile delinquent.

After the hearing, her mother cried in the hallway, saying that her daughter was used by investigators to implicate other white supremacists, then arrested.

Police arrested Colwell and the other alleged attackers, Randall Lee Rojas and Ritch Bryant, in October. Investigators have never explained why the investigation took nearly two years and have remained tight-lipped about the attack, saying that revealing details of the crime would harm the case.

Karen Colwell said her daughter left the gang and moved back home days after the killing, leaving behind her white supremacist beliefs.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carla Arranaga said Walker’s death was part of a “campaign of terror” by Colwell and her fellow white supremacists “designed to terrorize African Americans in Lancaster to create an all-white state, an all-white nation.”

Arranaga said Colwell admitted to singling out blacks in Lancaster and was proud of her white supremacist beliefs that blacks are inferior and inept.

“Jessica was an avowed white supremacist who had for at least a year and a half engaged in random acts of assault directed at defenseless African Americans,” Arranaga said. “She admitted to being involved in a number of race-related incidents where African Americans were singled out.”

In August 1995, she was among the group members who threatened to blow up a coffee shop in Lancaster because it served black patrons. Two months later, she participated in an attack on two African American males and intimidated the white women who accompanied them in Mariposa Park, Arranaga said.

The prosecutor said Colwell admitted to continuing racist attacks into 1996, well after Walker’s slaying, but was never arrested for those crimes. She was arrested hours before Walker’s killing, however, for shoplifting at a mall, Arranaga said.

Afterward, she returned to a friend’s house, the gang hangout, where she was staying after having run away from home. Her father arrived, trying to bring her home, but she called out for her white supremacist friends to help her and they beat her father while she kicked him, Arranaga said.

About 8 p.m., three Nazi Low Riders beat Walker in the vacant lot and left him lying in his own blood. Then they went back to their hangout and bragged about it.

One of the alleged attackers, Bryant, wanted to return and “earn his bolts,” Arranaga said. Colwell went with him. While Bryant was beating Walker with a wooden stick, Arranaga said, Colwell picked up a chrome pipe and joined in, smashing him in the head and shoving the pipe into his eye.

Then she tried to wipe the evidence off the pipe and went with Bryant to make arrangements for the tattoos.

Colwell’s lawyer said the teen thought Walker was dead and that she beat him only because she was afraid she would be beaten by the other gang members if she did not.

“What the minor did was poke the dead man so she would not be the subject of violence,” defense lawyer Jack Rudolfsky argued. He noted that she never got any lightning bolt tattoos.

At one point, Rudolfsky referred to the killing as a “sad event,” angering Rochman, the judge. “That’s like calling World War II a small diplomatic misunderstanding,” Rochman said. “It was a vicious, unprovoked, violent assault on a 43-year-old black man in a vacant lot for no reason whatsoever other than the man was black.”