Tagger, Now Out of Limelight, Wants to Get on With His Life

It’s been quite a ride for David Hillo. From tagger and low-grade thorn in the side of society to international cause celebre, and back again.

Now Hillo, who swapped small talk with Geraldo Rivera and fielded calls from foreign governments offering their support against what they claim is a racist American legal system, says he just wants to do his time and get on with his life.

He’s finally ready to forget the man who made him famous by putting a bullet in his rear.

“I’ve already let him go,” Hillo says of William Masters. “If I wanted to do something [out of revenge] I would have.”

Masters is the passerby who shot Hillo and killed his best friend, Cesar Rene Arce, at a North Hollywood freeway overpass, where the two men were spraying graffiti. The incident became a national symbol for the public’s rage over graffiti. It also became a focus of minority complaints against the legal system when the district attorney’s office ruled the shooting justifiable because Hillo was brandishing a screwdriver.

The controversy catapulted the two men onto the national stage. An unlikely pair of polemicists in America’s ongoing symposium on race, there was Masters, the gun-toting passerby who showed little remorse after the shooting, accusing Arce’s parents of not raising him right, and Hillo, the withdrawn, baby-faced young man who had been in trouble since he was 16. Hillo recalled their encounter on the TV shows “Geraldo,” “Charles Perez” and “20/20,” among others.

It was a brief, incandescent moment of fame, but now Hillo’s life has tumbled back into a familiar pattern. Only 20, he is serving a 905-day sentence at the Wayside Honor Rancho on a variety of charges, ranging from vandalism to grand theft for taking $59 worth of cold medicines from a Lucky store in June.

Now, both men are backing away from the celebrity spotlight. Hillo sums up his brush with fame this way: “I should have just read a book instead of tagging” that night.

Masters’ attorney, Chuck Michel, declined to let his client speak for the record. Michel worried that Masters’ penchant for saying things that could be “misconstrued” might flare up as he approaches an Aug. 7 trial date on misdemeanor firearms charges associated with the Arce killing.

In the past, Masters inflamed an already racially tense situation by showing little sympathy for the men he shot. He referred to Arce and Hillo as “Mexican skinheads,” a phrase that still nettles Hillo. “There’s no such thing,” Hillo fumed.

Michel insists Masters is not a racist, but said that “he is not adept at phrasing things politically correctly.” The bottom line, Michel said, is that Masters would also like to put the affair behind him.

From the beginning, the incident that started everything was cloaked in mystery. All that was clear was that Masters, a part-time actor and writer who had been charged in Texas with carrying swords in public, was taking a midnight stroll on Jan. 31. He came upon Hillo and Arce spraying graffiti at a North Hollywood freeway overpass.

This was nothing new for Hillo, a lanky six-footer known as GES, SPECIAL and SNEAKY in tagger circles. Hillo had been arrested at least four times on vandalism charges and had spent five months in a youth camp.

He and Arce, 18, were part of the same tagging crew, CFK, which stood for, among other things, Crew for Kings.

A high school dropout who never knew his real father, Hillo can be taciturn and monosyllabic at times and outgoing at others. He has a round face with even, well-made features. He admits girls have been interested for years.

He and Arce had been friends since elementary school. “He was real nice,” Hillo said in the interview. “If he saw an old lady carrying groceries, he would go over to see if he could help.”

Masters told police that when he saw Arce and Hillo tagging, he jotted down the license number of their car. He shot them after they threatened him with a screwdriver and tried to rob him, he said.

Hillo has repeatedly said he was not trying to rob Masters. He cited Masters’ first comment to police, which he later changed, as proof that Masters was a vigilante looking for trouble. “I shot him because he was spray-painting,” a sobbing Masters told police that night.

Hillo says that after Masters shot him, he walked up and lectured the fallen Hillo. “He was telling me, ‘Why was I tagging? Why did you make me shoot you?’ ”

Hillo also told more than one story. Police said he first told them he had been wounded in a drive-by shooting, then said he had not had a screwdriver that night. He finally admitted that he had been holding a screwdriver and gave Masters a defense when he told police he could understand why the 35-year-old man “panicked out.” Prosecutors ruled that Masters had acted in self-defense, and filed no charges.

Luis Carrillo, who represented Hillo at the time, accused the police of doing a slipshod investigation aimed at clearing Masters, whom he called “a white guy that looks like he belongs in England.”

Hillo, whose impression on the world had been no more lasting than a few road-sign scrawlings that hadn’t yet been erased, found himself a cause celebre. He jetted to New York and Philadelphia and stayed in fashionable hotels. He took calls from politicians in Mexico who asked if he needed any help fighting what they said were the forces of racism that allowed Masters to go free.

It was a heady experience for Hillo and his girlfriend, Lilia Arce, Cesar Rene’s sister, with whom Hillo has a 2-year-old daughter. Friends say Lilia Arce got so caught up in the frenzy that she quit her job as a dental office receptionist to devote full time to her new career.

“People here say, ‘You’re famous,’ ” he said of comments by his inmate friends. “This and that. “When I was doing all these things, I never smiled about it. The reason I went on was to give Rene’s side. People were saying [Masters] was a hero.”

It was an eye-opening experience, especially the reactions from TV viewers and listeners to talk radio.

“All the white people were for him,” Hillo said. “All the Mexican people were for us.”

But once the media frenzy went away, Hillo’s life fell into an old pattern. He was sentenced to 20 days in jail on the vandalism charge connected with the freeway tagging incident. Another 20 days were added because he refused to surrender as ordered.

Less than two weeks later, he was arrested after another graffiti spree. Within hours of his release on that charge, he was rearrested and charged with robbery after he allegedly hit a security guard while trying to make his escape with a pocketful of cold medicines.

Michel said Hillo’s continuing problems vindicate his client. “Bill feels Mr. Hillo’s subsequent conduct is indicative” of the kind of behavior that Masters accused him of on that January night.

A probation report prepared before Hillo’s sentencing was equally harsh. It accused Hillo of being “deeply antisocial” and leading a “parasitic existence chiefly dedicated to the defacing or destruction of the property of others.”

David Kestenbaum, the attorney who worked out the plea bargain that saved Hillo from prison, disagreed. Compared to others growing up in the same troubled milieu as Hillo, he is “on the not-so-bad side.”

In Kestenbaum’s view, Hillo was caught up in a series of events that caused him to spiral downward. First, he lost his best friend. Then, three more friends were killed when the car they were in was hit broadside in June by another car fleeing the police.

Hillo knew them by their tagger names, TROPIC, ENDS and ESTEK. But he insists they were not out tagging that morning, as some have speculated.

They had been out with some girls, he says. They were less than a block from home when their car was hit at Sherman Way and Kester Avenue in Van Nuys. That was the same intersection where Hillo lived with Lilia Arce.

“All they had to do was make it past the intersection and they were home,” he said.

Hillo was tagging memorials to them when he was arrested on the most recent vandalism charge.

Now, the media tsunami has washed over the tall, soft-spoken Hillo and swept on. There are no more TV interviews. Geraldo hasn’t written. Hillo’s girlfriend has moved to Arizona. Worst of all, key family members have abandoned him, saying he dishonored their name.

He says he doesn’t blame them. He let them down “too much,” he said.

“I’ve been through a lot,” Hillo said. “Ever since Rene, everything has gone downhill.”

Kestenbaum has warned him to change his ways or risk doing life “on the installment plan. . . . He’s become a political Ping-Pong ball now,” said Kestenbaum. Hillo has become one more image on which people project their fantasies and prejudices about what is wrong with American society, observers said.

Having returned from one beachhead in the struggle over race, Hillo himself has a unique point of view about the future of multicultural America. Even he lamented the tendency to turn so many things into racial issues. “All the cases, it always turns into race,” he said.

He had a more hopeful outlook than many doomsayers, suggesting that the rhetoric be toned down. “As long as we don’t let it get blown out of proportion,” he says, we should be fine.

How about Hillo? Will he be fine? “All the hard things are in the past, I like to believe. Just like everything fell into place going downhill, everything will fall into place going up.”

He says he is trying to adjust to jail life, but sometimes at night, frightening images return.

“There are certain things I see, like the flash of the gun,” Hillo said. “The way [Rene] fell flat on his face. His legs flopped up like he had no life.”

The whole thing “messed with my head.”