A decade after the killing of a Chino Hills man and the wounding of five people at a Jewish community center during a San Fernando Valley shooting spree, the convicted gunman has renounced his white-surpremacist views while expressing “deep remorse.”
“I feel a life based on hate is no life at all,” Buford O’Neal Furrow Jr. wrote in a letter from the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., where he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
“(Victims) probably will never forgive me, but I am truely (sic) sorry and deeply regret the pain I caused.”
These are the most extensive public comments by Furrow, now 47, about the Aug. 10, 1999, killing of letter carrier Joseph Ileto in Chatsworth and shootings of three children, a 16-year-old summer-camp counselor and an adult staff member at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills. Furrow told investigators he targeted Ileto because the victim was a non-white federal employee.
Furrow avoided the death penalty by agreeing to plead guilty to murder and firearms charges. He was given two consecutive life sentences and an additional 110 years running consecutively with the life sentences. In his letter, dated Aug. 19 and hand-written in ballpoint ink on two sheets of ruled paper, Furrow implied it wasn’t until years later that he broke from his white-supremacist beliefs.
“I now publicly renounce all bias toward anyone based on race, creed, color, sexual orientation, etc. and am a much happier person,” Furrow wrote.
Furrow did not say what caused the change.
Ileto was memorialized when a post office in Chino Hills was named for him.