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Shuffled among five different high schools because of his gang activity, Hagan was arrested as a juvenile in 1979 for robbery and served five months. In 1981 he mugged an off-duty policeman and served four years. He finally managed to graduate in 1982 while behind bars. "When I was younger, it was fun," he says of his criminal career. "Like Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. I didn't think I was going to get into the radical stuff." But the radical stuff became addictive.
Raised amid violence, Hagan responded with greater violence. Walk around like a hand grenade with the pin pulled, and people will make room. A soldier since age 13, he is adept at using battlefield logic to justify the daily carnage. "If you're in a war, you just accept that the only thing you can do is stay alive," he says. He impatiently explains the necessity of stealing from the enemy: "It's like I'm coming up in the world, you know. I'm trying to make it, and I need your wallet. That's how I see it." He bluntly cautions his victims not to resist: "If you pull out a gun on us, we're not going to leave you walking. You're trying to retaliate, and that means you just don't % care about us." Cocking his head back, he adds menacingly, "Think about it: Do you want your wife and kids to find you six feet under because of your wallet?"
Still, even that twisted logic does not explain his cold-blooded murder of Kellie Mosier. A junior in high school, she was working at her first job, behind the counter of an ice-cream parlor. While Hagan was being initiated into gangs at the age of 13, she was still playing with dolls. Resisting pressure at school to join the gangs, she selected friends who shared dreams beyond the streets, and they stuck together for protection. Poised and attractive, she dreamed of being a fashion model.
Kellie was gunned down just five blocks from the neatly manicured, stucco home in south central where she lived with her mother Irene, 36, and her grandparents. Now all that remains of her is the silver-framed picture on the mantel and the bedroom her mother will not touch. Kellie was an only child. "We were best friends," says Irene, sitting in her daughter's room beneath the pictures of cover girls still taped to the wall.
After Kellie was killed, Irene quit her job as a clerk at a computer software company and stormed the streets in search of the killer, barging into local dope houses with a fury born of grief. Then came a letter from a sympathetic inmate in the county jail who provided the names and addresses of the gang members involved. Irene waited three days before passing the tip on to police. She explains, "I wanted to kill him myself."
During the trial, Irene endured Hagan's remorseless composure and watched in disgust as he reveled in the pride of gang life. Sometimes, when she sits alone in her daughter's room, she cannot help wondering where a young boy learns to pull the trigger without blinking, why manhood in the ghetto is such a dangerous thing. "I knew these gang members when they were just babies," she says sadly. "Now look at them. They've turned into killers."
Across town in the Los Angeles County jail, Hagan is chuckling. He cannot believe someone would ask him how gang members learn to shoot. "It's just like in the movies," he explains, demonstrating different firing positions. "You just shoot until you hit something."