Warren Wilson, Pioneering Los Angeles TV Reporter, Dies at 90

Warren Wilson, Pioneering Los Angeles TV Reporter, Dies at 90 - The New York Times

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Warren Wilson, Pioneering Los Angeles TV Reporter, Dies at 90

In addition to covering the 1992 riots and other historically significant events, he helped facilitate the surrenders of 22 fugitives.

Warren Wilson, who in 1969 became one of the first Black television journalists hired in Los Angeles, and who used the trust he accumulated in his work to help fugitives surrender safely to the police, died on Sept. 27 in Oxnard, Calif. He was 90.

His son Stanley, a former news and documentary producer at CNN, confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility, but did not specify the cause.

Over more than 40 years as a reporter for wire services, a local radio station and the television stations KNBC and KTLA, Mr. Wilson covered the riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Hillside Strangler murders and the O.J. Simpson trial.

But over more three decades, he also became involved in the lives of 22 fugitives who decided it was safer to surrender to him than to be abused, or worse, by authorities during an arrest. Their surrenders were often shown on Mr. Wilson’s TV reports.

“People knew that if Warren Wilson was involved, that there would not be an incident where a person could be mistreated,” Bernard Parks, a former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, told The Los Angeles Times in 2005.

In 1988, for example, Mr. Wilson brought in a reputed gang member, Kirkton Moore, who was wanted in the slaying of a Los Angeles police officer. In 1993, he negotiated the surrender of a parolee, Keith Caldwell, who was wanted for questioning in the killings of two Compton police officers.

Mr. Caldwell’s mother, Catherine Robinson, told The Los Angeles Times that when she told a Compton police officer she was afraid that her son might be killed in a police confrontation if he stayed a fugitive, the officer suggested that she call Mr. Wilson.

“I guess I can identify with the underdog because of what I’ve had to go through as a Black man working in a white world,” Mr. Wilson said in 1993.

Warren Cereghino, a former editor at KTLA, wrote in a letter to Stanley Wilson after his father died that he “had brought great acclaim to our news operation when he turned the news parking lot into the celebrated ‘safe surrender zone.’

“People who criticized that,” he added, “didn’t understand how easily things could have gone sideways.”

Warren Griffin Wilson was born on June 14, 1934, in Bethel, N.C., and grew up on a farm in segregated Greenville, where his parents, Lonnie and Lizzie (Edwards) Wilson, who were sharecroppers, raised nine children. When Lonnie Wilson was 19, Klansmen struck him with a pickup truck and left him to die in a ditch. He survived.

“My father used to characterize North Carolina as Klansville USA,” Stanley Wilson said.

In 1952, Warren left the Jim Crow discrimination of Greenville for the Navy, where he held journalism jobs until his discharge in 1955. Within a few years, he was a reporter at the City News Service in Los Angeles. He then moved to United Press International, where in 1965 he covered the Watts rioting, which began after a Black driver was pulled over by a white California Highway Patrol officer on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.

In a first-person account, he described how one critical moment ignited.

“About 8:30 p.m. the lid went off,” he wrote. “Someone in the crowd yelled out, ‘It’s a white man, get him.’ Missiles sailed through the air, with a crackling sound as they struck the man’s car. They pelted the vehicle, continuously, knocking out windows and leaving ugly dents to his car. He lowered his head from sight and accelerated.”

Three years later, when Mr. Wilson was working for the radio station KFWB, he reported that Senator Kennedy was still conscious and talking after being mortally wounded by an assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan, in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Paul Dandridge, a former reporter and anchor at KNBC, said in an interview that Mr. Kennedy was “walking to the area where he was going to be interviewed by Warren when he was shot.”

Mr. Wilson was hired at KNBC in 1969. Warren Olney, a former reporter at the station, said that for a time “he was about the only Black reporter in town, and he bore that distinction comfortably.”

He stayed until late 1983, when he was one of several reporters fired by KNBC amid falling ratings. He soon moved to KTLA.

By then, he had gotten his delayed education. In 1972, he graduated from California State University, Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree in political science, and nine years later he received a law degree from the University of West Los Angeles.

While at KTLA, he shared in a Peabody Award for his coverage of the riots in 1992 that followed the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers for the beating of Rodney King, a motorist, which had been captured on video that was provided to the station.

The morning after the verdict, Mr. Wilson and a crew from KTLA headed to South-Central Los Angeles, where rioting had already broken out. Buildings were on fire. People hit the news van with bottles.

“People were striking back,” Mr. Wilson wrote in a first-person account in The Los Angeles Times. “They were saying, ‘You gave us this verdict. We’re going to give you this.’”

Mr. Wilson, who had suffered a heart attack six weeks earlier, spotted a building that was aflame. He ran up the stairs, entered an open apartment and stepped through a window to get to a man trying to douse the fire with a hose.

“I’d forgotten the heart attack,” he wrote. “My doctor had just given me permission to go back to work that week.”

Mr. Wilson won a local Emmy Award for individual achievement, for a report in 1980 about a shelter for teenage prostitutes, and shared in five others for team coverage of various stories. He retired in 2005.

A year earlier, he had filed a discrimination complaint against KTLA, saying that he had not been paid as much as some other reporters who were younger and white, and that he had not been given high-profile assignments. His son Stanley said he didn’t know how the case concluded.

Mr. Wilson’s marriages to Sylvia Martinez, Margaret Vasquez and Ann Archer ended in divorce. In addition to his son Stanley, he is survived by another son, Ronald, and two daughters, Pamela Wilson and Melissa Jones, all from his marriage to Ms. Martinez. He is also survived by a stepdaughter, Debra Hansen, who is Ms. Vasquez’s daughter from a previous relationship. Another daughter, Kim Wilson, whose mother was Ms. Martinez, died in 2003.

In addition, he is survived by 11 grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; three sisters, Julia, Sallie and Ruth; and two brothers, Willie and Fred Wilson.

Mr. Wilson recalled in 2005 that when he faced racism in newsrooms, he thought of the advice his father had given him:

“He told me, ‘Listen, they will knock you down on your knees, on your back, but you will have to get back up because as long as you stay there, that’s where you’ll always be. But if you get back up, you’ll always be a step above them.’”

Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades. More about Richard Sandomir
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