Slaying of Tagger Strikes Deep Chord in Community : Crime: Some experts say the support for the gunman is because of outrage over the decay of neighborhoods. Others worry that it may send the wrong message and encourage vigilantism.

It was a long-smoldering anger that had finally been ignited.

The spark that set it off was William Masters II, a 35-year-old part-time actor who took a handgun on a nighttime stroll and shot a tagger dead during a confrontation.

Masters was held a day and a half last week on suspicion of murder after the midnight shooting in Sun Valley. But in the short time it took the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to conclude that he had acted in self defense, he emerged as a hero, an ordinary citizen who many say boldly defended himself while standing up for his community.

Supporters lighted up the phones at talk show radio stations and the police lockup where Masters was being held offering money, legal assistance and pats on the back. One person even showed up to bring him dinner.

“I don’t fault the man one bit,” one radio caller said of Masters. “He’s an honest citizen. He’s getting involved. That’s what the police tell you to do. The only way you’re going to stop this stuff is to get involved.”

Many voices--some tempered, others wild--expressed what otherwise would be unspeakable thoughts: Applauding the violent killing of a young tagger as a benefit to society and praising the man who killed him.

Like racial slurs, urban graffiti provokes deep psychic turmoil that can push usually placid people to verbal excess and even violence, said law enforcement experts, sociologists and community activists.

Hopelessness, fear of rising crime and lower property values, feelings of personal indignity, and a profound sense of losing control are all strains of urban angst that can explode at the sight of a few cryptic markings on a wall.

Masters said he came upon Cesar Rene Arce, 18, and a friend, David Hillo, 20, Tuesday in Sun Valley spray-painting graffiti on support columns under the Hollywood Freeway. The confrontation began, he said, when he jotted down the license plate number of the taggers’ car. After he told them he was going to notify police, Masters said the two demanded the paper and then tried to rob him. He shot and killed Arce and wounded Hillo, who was carrying a screwdriver.

When Masters felled Arce with a bullet to the side he was defending his neighborhood, many believe. And for that, they are grateful.

Some even went so far as to lionize Masters as the new Bernhard Goetz, the New York subway rider who touched a national nerve over urban crime almost a decade ago by shooting four young men he said were threatening him.

The district attorney’s quick decision not to prosecute Masters because it was justifiable self-defense appeared to dampen the reaction last week before it grew into the national debate that simmered around Goetz’s trial and acquittal on attempted murder charges.

Nevertheless, the reaction that resounded throughout the area “expresses a long festering sense of demoralization about the decay of a neighborhood which graffiti often symbolizes and helps produce,” said Robert Pugsley, a professor at Southwestern University School of Law. “To the degree that somebody strikes back against them, it raises the spirit of those who have been silently oppressed.”

Masters bluntly added his own assessment of the public mood after his release Thursday.

“Where are you going to find 12 citizens to convict me?” he asked, vowing to continue flouting the law by carrying his gun without a permit.

“Are the criminals going to quit tomorrow?” he asked, rationalizing his resolve to pack a gun.

Although the district attorney has not ruled out filing a misdemeanor weapons charge against Masters, the official handling of the case has also struck a counter-chord of consternation among those who view the shooting as a dangerous step toward vigilantism.

“I am horrified the police didn’t hold this guy longer or do some investigation,” said Los Angeles writer Mike Davis, whose book “City of Quartz” paints a gloomy picture of urban deterioration. “This makes it look like it’s open season on taggers, or possibly open season on Mexican youth.”

The meaning of the shooting comes through far less clearly for several citizen leaders in the citywide battle against graffiti.

Jerry Shultz, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, Long Beach councilman and head of an anti-graffiti group, said he tells his group not to carry weapons or to confront taggers.

“That’s the police’s job,” he said.

Shultz conceded, though, that everyone he has talked to is solidly behind Masters.

“Since the shooting, I haven’t talked to a single person that said he should get any jail time whatsoever,” Shultz said. “They’re saying, ‘Great! It’s about time.’ ”

Others, such as Joe Shea, president of the Ivar Hill Community Assn. in Hollywood and leader of the Ivar Hawks, a Neighborhood Watch group, criticized those who would rush to condemn taggers.

“They are not relating to the real lives involved,” Shea said. “The blood isn’t real to them. The lives of the teen-agers aren’t real to them. When they can objectify them and demonize them, and talk about them as if they are some other species of life, it is easier to take their frustrations out on them.”

This is not the first time public opinion has seemed to marginalize the value of a tagger’s life.

In July, 1993, the deaths of seven taggers in a collision with an alleged drunk driver caused an outpouring of commentary on the value of a tagger’s life.

“I understand that death is very sad,” wrote Jennifer C. Cowherd of South Pasadena in one of many letters to The Times criticizing those who showed sympathy for the young victims. “But the fact remains that all of these youths were criminals who worked daily to deface our freeways. Should we applaud that?”

Detective Craig Rhudy, coordinator of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Community Tagger Task Force, said outrage over graffiti stems from its economic impact on the community as well as the emotional toll it takes on residents who feel imprisoned in blighted neighborhoods.

“They see these things happening and they feel helpless to do anything about it,” Rhudy said.

Overwhelmed by the problem, police agencies throughout Southern California have turned to the citizenry, arming neighborhood recruits with cameras and crime report forms to gather evidence against the elusive taggers.

More than 100 task force volunteers are at work in the San Fernando Valley, Rhudy said. In the past two years, they have helped develop evidence to convict 17 juveniles and five adults of felony vandalism charges.

Meanwhile, an Orange County crackdown resulted in 240 arrests in one four-month period in 1993, and cities across the Southland have set aside funds to buy supplies for dozens of neighborhood groups whose members go out in crews repainting soiled walls.

Despite those efforts, graffiti vandalism continues to escalate, police and community activists say, evoking greater fears than even some violent crimes.

“You can rob the 7-Eleven down the street from my house every week and I can drive by the store and not know it,” said Thomas Weissbarth, president of Sylmar Graffiti Busters. “But if you spray-paint the side of that building, every person in that neighborhood knows a crime has been committed.”

So when Masters stopped to write down the license number of the taggers, he was doing what many in the community wish they had the guts to do, Weissbarth said.

“A lot of people would have gotten the hell out of there,” he said. “But here is a man who did what was right, even at risk to his own safety. He did exactly what a good citizen should do. He observed, he documented and he left.”

Masters said Friday that that was all he intended to do. He said he bears no malice toward taggers. But he did not shrink from his newfound role as a symbolic crime fighter.

“We have let the criminal take so much control over our lives we have redefined what a decent person is,” he said.

Masters’ actions strike a chord with embattled residents eager to cheer the actions of a citizen who is standing up to a common threat, said Elijah Anderson, sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“They are impatient, fed up and want to control those who are out of line,” said Anderson, author of the 1990 book “Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community.” “Now you have law-abiding citizens who carry guns, use guns. . . . When they see something that is amiss, they want to react, even if that means reacting violently.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert L. Cohen, who reviewed the Masters case, said he took 50 calls--more than he has ever received on one case--all urging Masters’ release without any charges, and some recommending that the surviving tagger be charged with vandalism or even murder.

Cohen said the public pressure had no bearing on his office’s decision not to file charges against Masters, but they did cause him concern that the decision may appear to condone “people out there toting guns.”

“We are not trying to send a message that this kind of thing is OK,” Cohen said. “We don’t need any vigilantes on the street.”

But that is precisely the message many are hearing.

On his radio talk show on KMPC-AM Thursday night, conservative activist Xavier Hermosillo suggested that it was only because Masters was walking “with his partners, Smith and Wesson, (that) Mr. Arce will not be a repeat offender, for graffiti or anything else.”

Most callers agreed. Hermosillo said he logged more than two dozen calls over two nights from people like Henry from Studio City, who said that he could have been shot by bandits trying to steal his car had he not been armed.

“I would have been laid out for dead,” said the caller. “But I had my gun too and I got him first.”

Outside a Target store in Northridge on Friday, shoppers were not convinced that those who called police, prosecutors and talk shows reflect the views of the community.

“It’s a small minority that respond like that to any issue,” said Los Angeles County employee Ron Domash, 30.

He said he, too, is frustrated by graffiti appearing everywhere, but added that carrying a gun and confronting taggers is going too far.

“I’m tired of taggers, as are most people,” he said. “But I don’t think most people will take a gun and confront them.”

Two Cal State Northridge students said Masters should have been prosecuted, and by not filing charges it may lead to more violence.

“The taggers are going to look at it like, if they let that guy carry a gun then I should be able to carry one, too,” said Miesha Young, 19.

“So now, both sides are going to be carrying guns, which is just going to mean more violence,” Young said.

Times staff writer Julio Moran contributed to this story.