Cousin Held in Slaying of 11-Year-Old

By Richard Fausset

May 18, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

A 14-year-old boy was arrested for allegedly killing his younger cousin, then dumping the 11-year-old’s body in a trash bin, authorities said Monday.

The arrest came hours after the grandmother of both the victim and the suspect, Mildred Lockley-Pickens, made an emotional plea outside her South Los Angeles apartment for information that could help police find Bryan Lockley’s killer.

Police took the teenager into custody after a raid late Sunday on an apartment next door to his grandmother’s building. The suspect, whom The Times is not identifying because he is a minor, was being held without bail Monday at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey.

The motive, Los Angeles Police Capt. Kenneth Garner said, was an alleged “rivalry” between the boys. He would not elaborate.

Lockley-Pickens said she couldn’t comprehend how it happened.

She and her remaining family were locked inside the modest second-story flat Monday morning. TV cameras clustered by a memorial to the slain boy on a sidewalk below, as Lockley-Pickens fumbled with paperwork for Bryan’s funeral.

“I raised [the suspect] and Bryan both -- that’s why it’s so hard on me,” she said.

Hours earlier, the accused had called her from Juvenile Hall, insisting that the shooting was an accident, she said.

“I love him, don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “But I don’t understand why this had to happen. I’m just like his mama.”

Lockley-Pickens, 69, said she and her husband, Willie Pickens, 61, a disabled former auto paint-shop worker, had brought up both of the boys because their mothers had been on drugs.

Bryan’s mother, Francine Lockley, completed a drug rehabilitation program Saturday -- the day her son was killed. She returned to find the police in her mother’s apartment. The suspect’s mother hasn’t been heard from in years, Lockley-Pickens said. And family members said neither father was directly involved in the boys’ lives.

The grandparents said they did the best they could to raise the boys.

“My hope was for them to do better than I did,” Lockley-Pickens said. “My husband was trying to give the best things in life for them.”

Both boys played sports and loved watching wrestling with their grandfather. But while Bryan stayed focused on sports and out of trouble, the older boy started giving them problems, Lockley-Pickens said. He started skipping school at an early age. She suspected he was getting high and “trying to be gang-banging.”

And she was a woman in her 60s, with health problems.

“He wouldn’t do what I was telling him to do,” Lockley-Pickens said. “So I had the social worker remove him,” about three or four years ago.

The teen came back several weeks ago. Family members said he had run away from child welfare officials and moved in with a man in the apartment next door.

It was a complicated arrangement: Lockley-Pickens was hospitalized with a series of strokes in April, and she couldn’t commit to taking him back. According to the suspect’s cousin Ramona Reese, he was skipping school, afraid that the authorities would realize he’d run away.

But family members said they still loved the boy and tried to make things work.

“His grandma was like, ‘Well, at least he’s OK,’ ” Reese said.

The motives behind the shooting are unclear. Friends and relatives said the boys had a history of fighting but characterized it as the innocuous squabbling of boys raised as brothers.

Larry Anderson, Bryan’s uncle, said that he tried to warn Bryan to stay away from his older cousin but that Bryan didn’t listen -- he wanted to hang out with the older kids.

Neighbor Keisha Moore, however, said Bryan “wanted to be the opposite” of his cousin.

“He didn’t want to run the streets,” she said. “He was really into sports.”

Moore and a friend also said that the older boy seemed to be jealous of Bryan. The pair seemed distant for cousins, she said. And she had heard them arguing -- not fighting, just arguing about “stupid stuff.”

As of Monday evening, detectives had not presented a criminal case against the teenager to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. When they do, prosecutors will have the option of trying him as an adult, spokeswoman Jane Robison said.

Supporters of the family planned a candlelight vigil Monday evening. Najee Ali, director of the group Project Islamic HOPE, said the vigil would represent the neighborhood’s grief and the broader community’s failure to look out for two boys who grew up without their biological parents.

“But the true tragedy,” he said, “is that a grandmother has lost two grandchildren in one day.”