Witness Testifies on Videotape in Fatal Beating Case

Taking the stand 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 star 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 . . . I need to get it out so I can maybe get on with my life.”

He said the victim, 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, all of Antelope Valley, 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.

Three separate juries are hearing the case in Los Angeles Superior Court before Judge Lance Ito. The defendants face penalties of life in prison with no chance of parole.

“I ran over toward Randy . . . and got him away from the man,” Thornton testified.

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 urged Rojas on, saying, “Get that [racial epithet].”

The defense has denied the crime was motivated by racial hatred. Each defense attorney also has suggested that the other defendants may be responsible.

Thornton, who was 16 at the time of the attack, testified that he, Rojas and Bryant were walking when they ran into a white woman who said Walker had kicked her.

The trio of teenagers then confronted Walker in a vacant lot, Thornton said.

“I said, ‘Did you hit that woman back there?’ and . . . I kicked him.” Rojas then began hitting Walker with the board, Thornton said.

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

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