They were shot dead on the painted streets of Pomona, Lomita, and Lancaster and both inside and outside of captivity, stabbed beneath the sweltering Central Valley sunshine, and left.
One was a prostitute, and the other an blackmailer with connections to Israeli organized crime. A light supremacist group had two subjects, one of whom was fatal. His flatmate fatally shot an incarcerated criminal. In a stolen vehicle, another man was discovered dead.
What they had in popular, officials say, was that they’d run short of three reputed members of the Aryan Brotherhood.
On claims of criminal and death, Kenneth Johnson, Francis Clement, and John Stinson may start the trial on Wednesday. The defendants have entered a not-guilty plea and deny having any ties to the San Quentin group known as the Aryan Brotherhood, which was established almost 60 years ago by light prisoners.
Lawyers claim to have found seven murders involving Johnson, Clement, and Stinson, two of which were committed while they were behind bars and five on the pavements of Los Angeles County. The situation has been cloaked in secrecy. The Times obtained the victims ‘ identities from public records and law enforcement sources, not even by publicly naming them.
The plaintiffs are currently serving life sentences in prison. Each traveled down an odd and twisting course to the Fresno court, where the state may finally reveal its accounts of how murders were plotted from prison walls.
Plaintiffs from a “homicidal world”
Johnson, 63, has been serving a life word since 1996 for attempting to murder a Madera County sheriff’s deputy.
Called” Kenwood”, Johnson was born in Covina and raised in San Jose, according to pardon data. He served 14 times in a males ranch for burglary, escaping half, jail records show.
As an grownup, Johnson was imprisoned for robbery, rape and presenting weapons as a criminal. According to testimony at Johnson’s parole hearings, Johnson had been out of prison for four weeks when a Madera County deputy responded to a record of a cautious man armed with a blade after being given a lease in 1994.
Johnson fired four shots at the lieutenant, who wasn’t hit. The lieutenant reacted by striking Johnson in the shoulder.
Johnson was sentenced to life in prison and transferred to Pelican Bay, the country’s highest-security facility, where all of the country’s alleged prison gang officials were then being detained.
Johnson disputed Johnson’s affiliation with the Aryan Brotherhood during his parole hearings, citing the “homicidal world” behind prison walls as evidence in his administrative record, which included rioting and stabbings.
” Violence is part of the environment, like it or not”, Johnson said. ” And even if you don’t want to be involved in it, it’ll get you one way or another”.
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Martin, 58, has been locked up since committing a crime on his 18th day.
According to testimony at his parole hearings, Clement, a native of Springfield, Oregon, was celebrating when he checked into a Sacramento guesthouse with a companion and two young women.
At a parole hearing, Clement claimed at the time of his arrest that he found his friend raping one of the women after spending an evening having Jack Daniels and swimming in the motel’s share. Martin took out a bag knife and cut his brother’s neck.
Martin, who had previously been detained for second-degree death, was taken to the state jail in Vacaville where he and two other prisoners allegedly escorted a suspected agent to his pillow before cutting out a portion of his mouth.
Martin allegedly joined the Aryan Brotherhood in 1995, which he denied.
” I’m no part of no gang”, Clement told the parole board,” and I don’t plan on ever being part of no gang”.
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Stinson, 70, is something of an oddity, according to law enforcement officials.
Quieter and more controlled than Johnson and Clement, Stinson stepped over from the Aryan Brotherhood’s three-man decision” fee” after a federal judge in Los Angeles convicted him of crime and criminal in 2007, a see testified at a new trial.
Stinson had already been serving a life sentence for the 1979 murder of a drug trader. Stinson and Daniel” Cuate” Grajeda allegedly snuck into Alfredo Armijo’s Long Beach home while awaiting pardon at sessions for his co-defendant.
Grajeda, a reputed part of the Mexican Mafia, fired a gun in the air and told Armijo,” Grant up the dope”.
At Grajeda’s parole hearing, a director claimed that the attackers shot Armijo and his partner at gun to a house across the street where they believed the cocaine was stashed. When Grajeda alerted the officers were coming, Armijo and his partner were kneeling in the street.
” Should I take him”? Stinson asked, holding a.357 large to Armijo’s mind, according to testimony at the parole hearing.
Grajeda said little. Stinson squeezed the cause.
Both Grajeda and Stinson were found guilty of murder. Grajeda received a life sentence of 29 times. Stinson got life without parole.
In jail, Stinson ascended to the Aryan Brotherhood’s” commission”, which had the final word on inducting fresh people and killing present people, according to testimony at his criminal prosecution.
John Harper, a former member of the gang, testified that Stinson’s power went unspoken.
” We know who is calling the shots”, he said. You are aware of that man.
Victims in L. A. Counties and jail cells
On October 4, 2020, Allan Roshanski and Ruslan Magomedgadzhiev were discovered shot to death in Lomita.
Roshanski, 36, had been released from the California prison system in 2018 after serving a year for pimping women in Hollywood. In exchange for 20-30 % of their earnings, Roshanski advertised the women’s services on Backpage, negotiated rates with customers and booked hotel rooms for “dates”, prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Magomedgadzhiev, 40, was born in Chechnya and immigrated to Los Angeles in 2001, according to a letter he wrote to a judge. An Israeli organized crime figure in Tarzana requested assistance seven years later in order to resolve a dispute with a Las Vegas businessman who owned kiosks that sold cosmetics in shopping malls.
The businessman pulled a gun and shot Magomedgadzhiev in the buttocks, but Magomedgadzhiev and his brother launched an assault on the pair. In order to aid racketeering, Magomedgadzhiev admitted to crossing state lines while serving a two-year sentence.
On the orders of Johnson and Clement, Justin” Sidetrack” Gray is accused of shooting Roshanski and Magomedgadzhiev. All three have pleaded not guilty.
A detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit that an informant overheard him claim that he had been promised membership in the Aryan Brotherhood after he “got those two Russian guys.”
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On March 8, 2022, James Yagle Jr. and Ronnie Ennis Jr. were killed in Pomona.
According to a search warrant affidavit, both were members of a white supremacist gang known as Public Enemy Number 1, or PEN1.
Their alleged killers — Brandon” Bam Bam” Bannick and Evan” Soldier” Perkins — were also PEN1 members, a detective wrote in the affidavit. Clement is accused of being the murderer’s mastermind.
Perkins has pleaded not guilty. Bannick last week pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in connection with the homicides of Yagle, Ennis, Roshanki and Magomedgadzhiev.
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When Michael Brizendine didn’t come home the night of Feb. 22, 2022, his girlfriend tracked his phone to a house in Lancaster, a coroner’s report says.
A stolen Dodge Ram 1500 was parked in the driveway. The driver’s side rear window was shattered. Brizendine lay slumped behind the wheel, shot in the head, according to the coroner’s report.
Brizendine had just been released from prison after serving six years for assaulting a police officer.
Two months after Brizendine was killed, Los Angeles County prosecutors charged James” Suspect” Field with his murder. They dropped the charges after Field, 34, was indicted in the Fresno case, accused of killing Brizendine on Clement’s orders.
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When Brandon Lowrey was killed by his cellmate at Kern Valley State Prison, he was six years into a 10-year sentence for robbery and selling drugs.
Authorities described the Lowry’s murder plot in prison disciplinary records. Johnson, Clement and a third alleged Aryan Brotherhood member, David Chance, had drawn up a list of all white inmates with drug debts at Kern Valley, an informant told prison officials.
Lowrey, who owed nearly$ 1, 000, was “red-flagged”, meaning no inmates could sell him drugs until he settled his debts, the informant said. By purchasing more drugs than he already owed, Lowrey broke the law.
Thrasher Holmeyer, a convicted murderer from San Bernardino, volunteered to kill Lowrey, the informant said.
” Watch the news”, he said, according to the source. ” I’m going to handle this business right”.
Holmeyer became Lowrey’s cellmate on Jan. 10, 2016, according to prison records. Two weeks later, investigators discovered Lowrey dead inside their cell.
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Robert Hargrave opened an adult book store in Rubidoux in 1991 after losing his job and having to pay off his father for a car loan.
He shot the 23-year-old clerk eight times and stole the cash register, which contained$ 140, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported. Convicted of first-degree murder, Hargrave was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.
He died on the exercise yard at Kern Valley on April 30, 2020, stabbed to death, prosecutors allege, by two inmates acting on orders from Stinson.
According to prosecutors, Hargrave had attacked Andrew” Misfit” Collins, a prisoner with whom Stinson was operating a lucrative scheme to defraud California’s Employment Development Department during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After Hargrave’s death, Collins allegedly boasted:” We dropped that motherf —”.
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