|
MAGAZINE FORUMS ON LINE STORE |
|
Chronicle When KTLA-TV reporter Warren Wilson called a Compton, California, police detective in early April to ask whether they were looking for a guy named Regis Deon Thomas, there was a long pause on the other end of the line. The police in this city near Los Angeles had yet to release Thomas's name publicly, though he was wanted in connection with the slaying of two police officers six weeks earlier. In the ongoing search for Thomas, the police had raided the homes of several of his friends and relatives, knocking down one door with a battering ram. Thomas, fearing police revenge for the murders, had called KTLA, saying he wanted to surrender to Wilson -- on-air -- to ensure his safety. So, after getting the go-ahead from a detective in Compton, Wilson met Thomas at a secret location, patted him down, interviewed him, then drove him to a police station and handed him over -- all of this captured on tape and played on the KTLA nightly news. Thomas was the fifth suspect in the Compton case who tried, or whose friends or relatives tried, to seek out Wilson. In the end, three of the five prime suspects in the case actually gave themselves up to the fifty-eight-year-old reporter. Wilson didn't invent this kind of story, but he's certainly got it down. Over the last eleven years, he has brokered ten such surrenders, six of them related to police killings. He twice flew to Las Vegas to bring suspects back to Los Angeles. The most recent surrender, in September, took place in Beverly Hills, where a twenty-four-year-old wanted in connection with two robberies there turned himself in. As is often the case, the impetus came from the suspect's mother. Wilson, the son of a North Carolina sharecropper, says he is drawn to the frightened and isolated suspects -- most of them black, as is Wilson -- who have called him in need. But he gets involved in the surrenders, he says, for two main reasons: "If my intervention can prevent somebody dying on either side -- that is one of the reasons I do it." In the next breath, he adds: "It's a big story to have someone surrender to you who is armed and dangerous." Local journalists return a split verdict on Wilson's surrender stories. Some praise him for defusing what are potentially violent situations. "What is the alternative?" asks Tomas Lewis, managing editor of the Wave Newspaper Group, a chain of weeklies in south Los Angeles. "You turn the suspect down, they remain at large and maybe kill someone else." Wilson's own news director, naturally, is among the boosters. "It's a public service," Warren Cereghino says of the taped surrenders. "Maybe it's stretching the notion of public service, but that's what it is." Los Angeles Times media critic Howard Rosenberg, however, wonders whether the public sees Wilson as an independent journalist or as a sort of quasi-lawman. In a May 7 column, Rosenberg criticized Wilson for participating in the surrenders he covers. "The messenger should not eclipse, or even compete with, the message," he wrote. In the same column he criticized Wilson's 1988 decision to accept $ 25,000 in reward money from the Los Angeles City Council for bringing in the Las Vegas subject. Wilson says he donated most of it to south Los Angeles charities. As for future reward offers, Wilson says he will evaluate them when the time comes.
News Topics |
Home | Research |
History | Blood Gangs | Crip Gangs | People|
Life in a Gang |
Gallery | Iraqi Cards
|
Memorial |
Migration |
Graffiti | Resume| Injunctions
Homicides |
Maps |
California Prisons | Contact
MAGAZINE
FORUMS
ON LINE STORE
SURRENDER STORIES
An L.A. Reporter's Arresting Work
Columbia Journalism Review - November / December 1993
SURRENDER STORIES
An L.A. Reporter's Arresting Work
Sander works for The Associated Press in Los Angeles.Copyright © Streetgangs.com, All RIGHTS RESERVED. Disclaimer
All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
