Jury Wants Death for Bryant Ring Killer of 4 : Drugs: Panel recommends penalty for each of the 1988 slayings at Lake View Terrace crack house.

LeRoy Wheeler, a member of the Bryant Family cocaine ring, should die for his crimes--the point-blank executions of a woman and 2-year-old girl during a 1988 ambush at a Lake View Terrace crack house, a jury in Downtown Los Angeles said Friday.

The jury also recommended executing Wheeler for the murders of two drug rivals who were the intended targets of the ambush. Four times--once for each victim--the jury’s verdict was death. Wheeler, a 26-year-old also known by his street moniker, “Slimm,” kept his head up and looked straight ahead.

The jury of six men and six women began deliberating Monday, and next week will continue pondering the sentences for Wheeler’s two co-defendants, Bryant Family leader Stanley (Peanut Head) Bryant, 37, and associate Donald (Duke) Smith, 29.

Because the jury is still deliberating, attorneys in the case had little comment.

But lead prosecutor Kevin McCormick said as he left the courtroom that the four death verdicts “reaffirm my belief that the jury values the lives of these victims.”

Wheeler returns to court Aug. 11, when Superior Court Judge Charles E. Horan will set a date for sentencing, a formality, since judges almost always honor jurors’ death verdicts.

Wheeler, Bryant and Smith were convicted last month of multiple murder counts in the Aug. 28, 1988, shooting deaths of Bryant Family hit man Andre Armstrong, 31, his associate James Brown, 43, and Brown’s girlfriend, Loretha Anderson, and her 28-month-old daughter, Chemise English.

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The shootings occurred at a house on Wheeler Avenue where cash from the Bryant Family’s crack-cocaine sales was counted. Prosecutors said the ambush of the two men was carried out to quash a threat to the family’s monopoly over cocaine sales, estimated to be $500,000 a month, in the northeastern San Fernando Valley.

For more than 20 years, prosecutors said, the Bryant Family controlled the drug trade in the Pacoima area through intimidation, beatings, car-bombings, gunfire and perhaps as many as two dozen murders. But the shooting deaths of Anderson, 23, and her toddler daughter were particularly shocking.

“Don’t forget the victims,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin McCormick argued last week, as he urged the jury to return death verdicts.

“What kind of person sticks a gun six inches from a 2-year-old and pulls the trigger? How can you comprehend it?” McCormick asked. “How do I make you understand it?”

Armstrong and Brown were killed shortly before 5 p.m. on a warm Sunday, as they entered the heavily fortified crack house. As he stepped through a steel cage security door, Armstrong was shot through the heart and in the back of the head with two shotguns. Brown also was shot in the head, and his body was blown back through the front door.

Testimony showed that Wheeler shot the woman and child moments later as they sat in a parked car, listening to the radio.

James (Jay Baby) Williams, a Bryant Family money-counter who testified for the prosecution under a grant of immunity, told the jury he saw Wheeler run into the front yard, toting a shotgun and carrying a pistol in his waistband.

“There’s a bitch in the car!” Williams said he heard Wheeler shout. Seconds later, he said, he heard glass breaking.

In his closing argument, prosecutor McCormick described in vivid detail how Wheeler walked up to the car, pointed a shotgun and fired through the windshield at Anderson, who was strapped into the back seat, a child on either side of her.

Wheeler then walked around the car and leaned into the back seat, firing upon Chemise, who McCormick said was simultaneously cowering and reaching for her dead mother. Carlos, Anderson’s 1-year-old son, apparently overwhelmed by fright, never cried out. Wheeler left the boy for dead, lying in his mother’s blood.

“That’s horrific, isn’t it?” McCormick asked the jury. “Can you imagine the terror that child felt? That’s part of what you have to consider.”

Wheeler’s lawyer, Hattie Harris, portrayed him as a victim of his upbringing--abandoned by his 17-year-old father and neglected by his mother, a 15-year-old runaway. His words and actions can be understood only when considered in context with his upbringing, she argued.

“We are all born beings, but we have to be taught to be human,” Harris said.

The Bryants, she said, filled Wheeler’s need for a family and father figures.

“He was desperate to align himself with men,” she said, “and that’s what he found--a family that predisposed him to have values that weren’t quite right.”

She asked the jury to show mercy for Wheeler, who was 19 at the time of the crime. “As men get older, for whatever reason, they calm down.”

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But prosecutors told the jury that Wheeler, who appeared in court in preppy sweaters and turtlenecks, had not been a model prisoner. They offered testimony that showed he’d been involved in a jailhouse stabbing and a sexual assault of another prisoner, testimony that provoked Wheeler to call McCormick a “punk,” followed by two expletives.

The jury saw another side of Wheeler when he took the stand during the trial. Under cross-examination, Wheeler had seemed almost proud of the status and perks his role in the Bryant Family brought him--stacks of cash and gold chains thick as fingers, a pearl-white Audi like Stan Bryant’s and a Mustang convertible with $75,000 stashed in the trunk. The Mustang, Wheeler said, was his “bank.”

In their closing remarks, both the prosecutor and the defense attorney had cited the testimony of a psychologist hired by the defense, who asked Wheeler why he shot the woman and child.

“Commitment,” Wheeler responded. “Loyalty.”