Life Filled With Violence Leads to Murder Case--at 13

There were eight, maybe 10, of them in all, and what they were accused of doing on a sunny day in July a year ago can still send the mind reeling, the heart searching for some explanation.

On a Friday afternoon, police say, a group of young toughs--the oldest only 20--were roaming the streets of South Los Angeles when they settled in at an abandoned duplex. Not long after they arrived, police say, a 13-year-old girl walked by the filthy building and the youths dragged her inside, taking turns raping her for an hour and a half before trying to kill her by setting the house ablaze.

And when that did not happen, and a neighbor confronted two youths about playing with fire, police say, they pulled out pistols and fired, missing the neighbor, but killing his 82-year-old grandmother.

Until now, the orgy of violence on July 26, 1996, has focused on its victims, including Viola McClain, a local activist who had lived in her Craftsman bungalow on 111th Street since 1935.

But today, in a Downey courtroom, the attention will center on a young boy whose life, authorities say, was already marked by a frightening level of violence before it collided with a God-fearing woman known throughout her neighborhood as “Mother McClain.”

The youth, who was not identified by The Times because of his age, was 11 when he was arrested by Los Angeles police after a virtual dragnet announced by then-Chief Willie L. Williams, who took the unusual step of publicly naming the boy. Although the boy and an older youth will both appear today in Juvenile Court for McClain’s slaying, it is the younger boy--just turned 13--whose actions that day allegedly stood sadly apart from the group.

At 4 feet, 10 inches tall and weighing 70 pounds, the boy was hardly imposing physically when he was the only one of the youths accused of both sexual assault and murder. Five of the youths have been charged with sexual assault, and two were charged with murder.

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In the neighborhood around the Nickerson Gardens housing project where he lived, a neighborhood that is all too familiar with kids hardened beyond their years, this youth, authorities say, already was known as a “young gangster” to be reckoned with.

“This kid is as tough as anyone I’ve ever met in there,” said LAPD Det. Bill Smith, who handled the murder investigation with partner Dan Jenks. “The people in the neighborhood are afraid of him,” Smith said.

The boy’s attorney could not be reached for comment.

First arrested at age 10, the youth was expelled from Edwin Markham Middle School the next year for brawling. Before that happened, he once challenged an LAPD officer to a fight on the campus. “Take off that gun right now,” the officer said he was told, “and I’ll kick your ass.”

And long before his arrest last July, authorities said, the youth was so violent so often that his own mother feared him.

“She called us,” Smith recalled.

But even for authorities familiar with the case, the notion of a young, unrepentant predator remains hard to reconcile with the short, wispy boy now accused of such vicious crimes.

“I look at him, and it is like, ‘Oh, my God. He’s tiny,’ ” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Eleanor Hunter, who will prosecute the youth. “You look at him and he looks like a baby.”

But in a case that will be heard by Juvenile Court Judge Cecil Mills, authorities allege that the youth’s actions were anything but childlike.

He’s the one, authorities allege, who brandished a semiautomatic pistol from his baggy black pants and fired at McClain, who was felled by a fatal wound to the throat.

And shortly before that killing, the same youth took part in the gang rape of the 13-year-old girl--a crime that Mills has already concluded the boy helped commit. His sentence to the California Youth Authority for that crime will await the pending hearing, authorities said.

If the murder charge against the youth is found to be true, he faces a maximum sentence of 11 years because the authority does not hold prisoners beyond age 25, Smith said.

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To be sure, although murder cases like this one typically generate debate over trying more juveniles as adults, their involvement in the most serious of crimes remains rare.

“Whenever a case like this comes up, you have people talking about three or four examples and asking . . . do we have a pattern?” said Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the left-leaning Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in Washington, D.C.

“The good news is we don’t have a pattern. If you look at crime stats nationally over the last 25 years, the number of homicides committed by juveniles 12 and under has stayed the same,” Schiraldi said. “The number of homicides without handguns by all teenagers has also stayed the same.”

Nevertheless, Schiraldi notes that in the last decade the number of youths 13 and older involved in gun-related homicides has quadrupled. And with so much bloodshed involving so many youths, the debate continues over whether more juveniles should be tried as adults.

National studies, Schiraldi said, have been inconclusive on the value of such a strategy because states like New York and Florida, both with tougher policies than California, also lead California in the per capita rate of juvenile felonies.

“California is third in the country. So we can’t say we are doing dramatically better than the other two states, but they also can’t say they are doing better than we are,” Schiraldi said.

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But as the McClain case gets underway, detective Smith expresses regret that the youngest youth in the case will only answer to the allegations in a Juvenile Court.

“If I had my druthers, I would . . . try him as an adult,” Smith said of the 13-year-old, who is one year shy of the youngest age for which California law allows such a prosecution.

In some cases, Smith said, he does not believe that youths should stand trial as adults because they can be rehabilitated, their lives turned around.

But this youth, Smith insisted, is not one of those cases.

“Any time I have spoken to him, he has not shown any remorse for the crimes,” Smith said. “He’s the hardest little kid I’ve ever met.”

Of all the murder cases being handled by the LAPD’s South Bureau homicide unit, Smith added, none involves a bigger evidence book, based not only on the number of and background of defendants but the viciousness of the charges.

“There are just thousands of pages,” he said.

Added Smith: “He’s just a little kid who should be riding his bicycle and eating ice cream.

“You look at him and you would never suspect, never suspect this.”