The California Supreme Court Monday upheld the convictions and death sentences of three drug ring members who ambushed and killed four people, including a 2-year-old girl, in Lake View Terrace nearly 26 years ago.
The drug ring’s asserted ringleader, Stanley Bryant, was convicted along with Donald Franklin Smith and Leroy Wheeler for the Aug. 28, 1988, shootings of Andre Louis Armstrong, 31; James Brown, 43; Brown’s girlfriend, Loretha Anderson, and her 28-month-old daughter, Chemise.
The prosecution asserted Bryant directed the shootings of Armstrong and Brown because Armstrong was a threat to Bryant’s business, and that Smith and Wheeler participated in the killings at Bryant’s direction, the state’s highest court noted. Both men were shot twice.
Anderson — who was in a car with her two young children — was shot several times with a shotgun and a handgun, and her 28-month-old daughter was shot in the neck at close range by a handgun. Her infant son was not shot but was injured by flying glass.
“While each had different roles and different places in the (Bryant) Family hierarchy, there was ample evidence that all defendants were well aware of the nature, scope, and brutality of Family operations and willingly took part,” Associate Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote on behalf of the panel.
The justices found that “the strength of the evidence against each defendant was roughly equivalent” and that each of the defendants was “incriminated by his ties to the Bryant Family.”
Bryant and Wheeler were each convicted of four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder, along with the special circumstance allegation of multiple murders. Smith was convicted of two counts each of first- degree murder and second-degree murder and one count of attempted murder, as well as the special circumstance allegation of multiple murders.
The three were sentenced to death in October 1995.
—City News Service