A state appeals court panel Friday upheld a man's conviction for the murder of an 11-year-old boy who was abducted more than three decades ago while walking home from school in Inglewood.
The three-justice panel from California's 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected the defense's contention that there was insufficient evidence to support Edward Donell Thomas' murder conviction for the May 24, 1990, death of William Tillett, along with a special circumstance allegation of murder during the commission of a kidnapping.
The boy was kidnapped just before 3 p.m. that day in the area of Imperial Highway and Crenshaw Boulevard while walking home from Kew Elementary School.
Authorities did not know if he was forcibly taken off the street or lured into the vehicle, and did not determine a motive for the crime.
The boy's body was found about 10 p.m. that night after a silver Datsun 280ZX hatchback containing two men was seen driving down a driveway of a Hawthorne triplex, where it was discovered between two cars in a carport that was not visible from the street, the panel noted in its 28-page ruling.
He had been suffocated and his hands and feet were bound with duct tape, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman told jurors during Thomas' trial.
Thomas -- an ex-con who lived in Pomona at the time of his arrest -- was linked 27 years later to DNA on the pants the boy had been wearing.
"The family's been waiting for many years," the prosecutor told the jury. "Science finally caught up with the defendant."
The director of a crime lab that performed the DNA testing opined that "the probability of finding another random individual that was not Thomas, who matched the major contributor's profile, was approximately 1 in 470 quadrillion, according to the appellate court panel's ruling.
Thomas' trial attorney, Rodolfo Navarro, had told jurors in his closing argument that there was "no evidence that Mr. Thomas kidnapped William or aided and abetted the killing." He suggested a theory that someone else kidnapped and killed the boy and then called his client to dump the body -- something with which his client was not charged.
The appellate court justices concluded that there is "substantial evidence to support the theories Thomas either manually suffocated Tillett or held him down while someone else taped Tillett's mouth and nose, which caused the asphyxiation."
Thomas, whom the prosecutor said had a silver 1979 Datsun at the time, was arrested in February 2019 by Inglewood police. Before his trial, he pleaded no contest to being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Thomas was sentenced in April 2022 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A second man is suspected of being involved in the crime, but there is no admissible evidence linking him to the killing, the prosecutor said after the verdict.
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